Marko Schuetz writes:
> >>>>> "Mark" == Mark P Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> Mark> One of the greatest disappointments to date of the move
> Mark> to more liberal (i.e. free software) licenses for systems
> Mark> like Hugs and GHC, is that it has done almost nothing to
> Mark> stimulate contributions to the implementations themselves
> Mark> from outside the immediate (and small) group of developers
>
> Maybe I am too optimistic, but IMHO we're merely much earlier in the
> process of spreading functional language use. It has taken the Haskell
> community quite some time to switch to liberal licenses. IIRC only
> Hugs used to come with a license at all, neither hbc, ghc nor nhc used
> to have one for quite some time. (Compare this to the mercury team who
> have distributed their compiler with the GPL from when I first became
> aware of its existence.)
>
> Mark> concerned. Compare this, for example, with the Linux
> Mark> community where the number of external contributors is
> Mark> often cited as one of the benefits of the development
There is another factor here, which is being overlooked. It is not difficult for
most hackers to contribute to Linux, even to the kernel. But most of those same
people simply do not have the technical knowledge to contribute to ghc. Most of
them probably cannot even write Haskell programs effectively yet.
So I agree with Marko that it is too early to feel disappointed. First, we need
to encourage hackers to retrain in functional programming (remember this is a
large paradigm shift). In a few years time, those hackers who started learning
now will be competent functional programmers. Then we can hope that, as they
move on from being competent to being expert, they may begin to contribute to
language implementations.
Tim
