> It might be a good idea to publish GHC under the GNU Public License or
> something similar. It grants everybody the right to use the software for
> any purpose, including making extensions or modifications of it - as long
> as the "derived work" is published under GPL as well. This ensures that no
> company can take the product, make some small modifications to it and call
> it their own. Whatever you choose to do, I think you need to be more
> explicit about which rights you grant the users of GHC to avoid unwanted
> use/misuse by anyone.
>
Or a non-profit consortium, as someone mentioned it already. I am not
in a position to advice, but the example of Bertrand Meyer and his
Eiffel language comes to mind so vividly. :-)
Originally Eiffel was Bertrand's child. Later he gave all his rights to
NICE - Non-profit International (?) Consortium for Eiffel. His greatest
worry was to keep Eiffel as a pure, uniform language, without dialects.
This seems to work. All decisions on future of Eiffel are voted by voting
members, and Bertrand is just one of them.
There are several commercial companies that maintain Eiffel compilers
and libraries, including Bertrand's own ISE in Santa Barbara.
Jan
