On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Markus Mottl wrote: 
> On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> > I think altruism and love for OCaml is a lot closer than very specific
> > selfish reasons.
> 
> I love OCaml, because it helps me solve my problems much more easily. Does
> this make my love selfish? ;)
> 
I think the lack of willingness to support OCaml financially is correlated with
the lack of perception of the extent to which OCaml makes software development 
easier and as a consequence cheaper. Those who use a programming language in their daily
work are in many cases not those who decide on money. And in order to convince
someone to spend money for the development of a product like OCaml 
(not mainstream, almost no one knows it, there is not even an English text book, 
no commercial support)  one must have very good arguments. I think what could
be very helpful is a detailed list of OCaml's strength (and weeknesses if any) 
compared to languages like C++, Java and also compared to other ML-implementations,
Lisp, Haskell, Clean etc.? This list should also include real world examples (not to
complicated) to demonstrate OCaml's benefits. 

Another point could be that people are more likely to spend money for getting a product
or support than for supporting someone else to develop a programming language. So why not 
taking a fee for commercial use of OCaml or for support (Clean, Python, Lisp)?  

Rolf Wester


-------------------------------------
Rolf Wester
rolf.wester@ilt.fraunhofer.de
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