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 UAA21516 for caml-red; Sat, 10 Feb 2001 20:23:13 +0100 (MET) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA09665 for ; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 17:22:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from miss.wu-wien.ac.at (miss.wu-wien.ac.at [137.208.107.17]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f19GMTL29471 for ; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 17:22:29 +0100 (MET) Received: (from mottl@localhost) by miss.wu-wien.ac.at (8.9.0/8.9.0) id RAA29412; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 17:22:25 +0100 (MET) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 17:22:25 +0100 From: Markus Mottl To: Fabien Fleutot Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: R: Consortium Caml Message-ID: <20010209172223.A28842@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> References: <000201c090f4$0f5013a0$18ab6ed4@alex> <20010208014519.A13836@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> <20010209154550.7ba53a91.fleutotf@esiee.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010209154550.7ba53a91.fleutotf@esiee.fr>; from fleutotf@esiee.fr on Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 15:45:50 +0100 Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr On Fri, 09 Feb 2001, Fabien Fleutot wrote: > That's false: in a consortium, one pays a fee for one year, and by > the end of that year, there's no more membership, so no more value, > and no investment. A stock exchange wouldn't work in the same way, > if one had to re-buy its own stocks every year, would it ? This is a legal question rather than an economic one. Still, I fear that it will be difficult to gain many (= enough) members unless they see a certain benefit from it without having too much risk. The problem with the consortium is that if you are discontent, you will lose all of the donated money *and* your rights (after at most one year). If you have some ability to trade your "share of rights", you can get out again more easily. I think it is a realist assumption that in the longer term nobody will "donate" unless they have a profit from it. Considering an amount of 2kE (per year!), even my enthusiasm for OCaml is overstretched (that's far more than my monthly income). Assuming that OCaml makes it successfully into mainstream technology due to increased funding, having a large share of the votes is equal to having more market power (you can influence mainstream technology to your advantage): people (companies) will have interest in buying votes. But with a consortium with membership fees there are naughty game-theoretic aspects: if you don't donate and OCaml fails, you won't care: you haven't lost anything. If OCaml succeeds - fine! Then you can still participate at a later point and you'd have had a "free ride" until then (and more purchasing power = more votes at a more significant later date). Therefore, a "rational" potential sponsor wouldn't donate: he can only benefit with this strategy. But if all do so, OCaml is very likely to fail due to lack of funding! Therefore, it is necessary to change the pay-off matrix in such a way that it is rational to donate for OCaml - or better: to invest. I don't see how the consortium guarantees this: why should I donate for OCaml so that financially much more powerful but technologically short-sighted (or more rational?) companies will benefit from it in the future by buying me out? - I'd have had the costs and they'd take the profit (and then they'd probably take technological decisions like "we want to have a VisualOCaml" - argh!). > The idea of setting up facilities to create associations able to gather > the required 2K euro or wathever amount looks better and simpler: as soom > as the first one will be released, anybody else would just have to > cut-and-paste its status to create a new one. But even "associations" won't have a rational basis for donating. > Another solution would be to fix a minimal annual amount, and to give > a representativeness proportionnal to one's contribution: that way, it > wouldn't be necessary to create more than one association. Moreover, > this association would just be a way to externalise administrative > tasks, from the INRIA's point of view. I'd still favour a way in which the number of voting rights ("shares") can be traded: this would give investors control for an indefinite amount of time rather than just for a year and thus prevent others from free-riding. Issuing more voting rights would allow the OCaml-project to raise more money: the stakeholders will only allow this if it's in their interest = if the additional funding will lead to more profitable technology and therefore offset the diluting effect of more shares (an incentive for the OCaml-project to work efficiently in the interest of the stakeholders). The important bit is that during the "IPO" the voting rights are split between as many independent invididuals as possible, preferably ones with adequate technological background (members of this list? ;) There may be prohibiting legal aspects beyond my understanding, because I don't know anything about the relevant French laws... Best regards, Markus Mottl -- Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl