> It seems that many prominent Haskell people are more or less associated
> with Microsoft. It has just been announced that Hugs may go into
> Microsoft Developers Studio and Simon Peyton-Jones is about to move to
> Microsoft. Is there a risk (or change, if you like) that Microsoft will
> eventually take over the Haskell language? In my opinion it is very
> important that this doesn't happen. If Haskell is to have a future it
> must remain free and not dominated by a single company.
Haskell is a public domain language. Microsoft, like any other company, are at
liberty to build and sell a commercial implementation of Haskell. It would be
wrong to suggest that they could not or should not; indeed, I think that would
be a wonderful thing if they did. However, I have absolutely no reason to
believe that they are planning any such thing.
So far as GHC is concerned, I wrote on this list a month ago:
"More specifically, I plan to continue beavering away on GHC.
GHC is public domain software, and Microsoft are happy for it to
remain so, source code and all. If anything, I'll have quite a bit
more time to work on it than before."
So, sleep easy.
Simon
