Sven Moritz Hallberg
On Wednesday 12. June 2002 10:12, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
Knowing the GHC developers for quite a while (and having had BSD versus GPL discussions with them before), my answer would be that they are perfectly trustworthy, but suffer from the common "BSD is more free than GPL" misconception[1]. Otherwise, they are perfectly nice guys (even if they have a @microsoft.com address ;-)
I see the people being very nice. But there is the question whether MS would draw them away from GHC if it desides to go full-scale with something based on GHC. That would surely hit GHC hard. If they could just say, no, we're here to stay, MS is paying us, but they just want to use the compiler we make, not own it, I'd be perfectly fine.
That's an assurance beyond any license that you will rarely get. Even on a GPL'ed project, the company could always drop the funding unless the company's core business depends on that software. From a research project, such as GHC, the funding (= developer time) can always be cut. On the other hand, as long as there is continued interest in the software, somebody is going to support it to some extent. Manuel