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From: "Mattias Waldau" <mattias.waldau@abc.se>
To: <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 11:18:00 +0200
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Do you mean by industry that you are going to 
make commercial software using O'Caml?

As I see it there are several typical categories 
of commercial programs:

1. programs for internal use within an 
   organization (price = production cost)
2. server software (typical price > $15000)
3. client software (typical price $10 to $1000)

and there are essentially two OS out there:
a. Windows (hopefully we can soon ignore Windows 9x)
b. *nix

And unless you have a lot of VC-capital, the only 
combination where you can make money within a year 
or so is "client software" on "windows".

Reason:
1. Organizations buy server-software from established vendors
2. there are too few *nix out there

However, most of people on this list use *nix and create 
extra libraries for O'Caml on *nix. Most of these are 
useless for making commercial sellable software, since 
if you produce commercial software, you have to focus on 
what makes the software good and sellable, not learning 
how to compile PCRE on windows (Sorry Markus, just an example :-).

So if you want O'Caml to be used by commercial developers
creating commercial software, make sure that your libraries
work on windows. (And use the LGPL or even better the BSD-license,
if I improve a BSD-license library, I will of course try to
merge it with the general available version, so that I don't
have to maintain it.)

Due to the above reasons I only use core Ocaml and pure
Ocaml-libraries. I develop under Linux, in order to be able
to debug, and create release on Windows.

/mattias

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