From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id SAA08073 for caml-redistribution; Wed, 21 Apr 1999 18:48:33 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA06059 for ; Tue, 20 Apr 1999 10:23:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA03642; Tue, 20 Apr 1999 10:23:37 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA06112; Tue, 20 Apr 1999 10:23:36 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <19990420102336.02431@pauillac.inria.fr> Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 10:23:36 +0200 From: Xavier Leroy To: William Chesters , OCAML Subject: Re: licence issues References: <199904160854.KAA03929@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> <19990416184022.60993@pauillac.inria.fr> <199904191156.MAA22033@toy.william.bogus> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.89.1 In-Reply-To: <199904191156.MAA22033@toy.william.bogus>; from William Chesters on Mon, Apr 19, 1999 at 12:56:56PM +0100 Sender: weis > [Hypothetical Java compiler reusing the OCaml back-end] > You are quite right that you have made something special and > valuable. And if the licence is very free, then there is a good > chance that other people will find your code base useful in the sort > of way you suggest. If that happens, you will have made an even > bigger contribution to the public good than you have already I agree that in the long term reuse of free source code is generally beneficial to the public as a whole, and it's definitely the goal of government-funded research to offer its results to everyone. (Also, if we were that afraid of baddies stealing our ideas, we wouldn't distribute the source code at all.) However, there are two problems with the argument above. First, it assumes that the reuse of OCaml code cannot harm the development of OCaml itself. But this is not necessarily so. In the silly scenario I mentioned, I can already hear INRIA's management telling me "Ok, you told us that Caml and functional programming and type inference and so on are good. We believed you. We supported you during many years. Now the main outcome of your effort is a Java compiler developed by others who get all the credit for it. And you still want us to support you ?" All these long-term benefits of open source are not going to make much good if we get killed in the short term. > , and you > will, whatever happens, get a significant portion of the credit. This is the other problem. My experience is that this is not always so. For instance, how many users of Moscow ML know that the compiler and runtime system come straight from Caml Light? The MoML authors did everything right (putting copyright notices on all files, acknowledging INRIA in their Readme files). Still, I don't think we got any credit (in the general sense) from this code reuse. This is a very touchy topic for research. Research lives off peer and public recognition, just like commercial software lives off sales. > This is the standard theory of open source economics and I think > it's mostly true. I'm familiar with that theory. By the way, my yougest baby, LinuxThreads, is under the LGPL. But it's not a research project, just a hobby. The open source economics don't take into account a number of factors that are important for research, such as: - The need to maintain some competitive edge in order to justify one's existence (research that doesn't have any edge over what others are doing is a contradiction in terms); - The need to get exact credit for one's work (the system of journals and conferences does it quite well for research papers; no equivalent system exists for source code yet). I wish open-source "ayatollahs" (as I called them before) could think about these issues rather than just bullying everything that is not GPL. (The latter takes a lot less thinking, of course.) All the best, - Xavier Leroy