"Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" wrote:
> /* snip */
> You are completely and utterly missing the point. Or should
> I say, you are confusing it. Ian is not talking about moral
> here (moral arguments can be made, but he obviously didn't
> in the text you quoted) - he is talking about the practical
> benefit of having access to the source code and the right to
> change it.
>
> In any case, there is no problem with a company selling
> maintenance and guarantees and you buying them if you don't
> want to fiddle with the source yourself. But why an all or
> nothing approach? Take Linux, you can download it yourself
> and fiddle, or you can buy one of the ready made
> distributions and buy expensive support contracts. And mind
> you, there are people making millions just selling this kind
> of support. Obviously, free software and money-making
> companies can co-exist, as can hackers who want the source
> and users who want to concentrate on other things.
>
> Face it! Software is a service industry and not a
> manufacturing industry:
>
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html
>
> Of course, it is the right of the Clean team to do with
> their code whatever they want. All Ian is saying is that
> they could leverage their technology more effectively with a
> different development and distribution model, and that he
> doesn't want to be looked into a model where he doesn't have
> the freedoms that he perceives as important for himself.
> What problem do you have with this?
>
> Manuel
I don't know what he perceives, but from reading this, especially in
conjunction with "Re: Haskell & Clean" by Arjan van IJzendoorn (above) has
caused me to be more interested in Haskell than in Clean, when I was the
reverse earlier, basically because of IDE considerations (I thought the HUGS
development environment on Win32 looked ugly). Perhaps the Linux
environment is more aesthetic.
