RE: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

RE: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Mattias Waldau]

> I don't agree. My customers pay me to develop server
> software on *nix, where the clients just happen to be Linux 
> boxes but might just as well be windows boxes, for all I 
> care. And I'm paid pretty well actually.

Sounds more that you work as a paid consultant, so you make a 
living by selling hours, not software. Making a living as a 
consultant is much easier. I have also done that, but then 
you can't decide what you would like to do, and you can't select
the programming language of your choice.

What I meant was creating commercial software, where the bulk of
the revenue is on the licenses of the program. 
Much higher risk than the consultant, but you are your own boss.
(And you can use O'Caml, because your customers don't care)

For example, someone knowledgable in O'Caml could take
Spam Oracle by Xavier Leroy and improve it and package
it for MS Outlook. You can probably sell it for $29, so
if you sell more than a few thousand licenses per year,
you make a living. (I think there is about one billion
PC's and more that one hundred million MS Office
users out there). Try to find a couple of thousand Linux
users who are willing to pay, not even the Linux 
distributors succeed in that :-)


(I haven't checked the licensing of Spam Oracle, so ask
Xavier Leroy first.)


It will probably difficult for you to make everything
using O'Caml, you will need C++ or VB.

Some links to get you starting:

Microsoft Office 2000 provides an extensibility interface 
that can be exposed by add-ins created in Visual Basic, 
Visual C++, or Visual J++ in order to connect to and 
disconnect from any Office host application.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dno2kta/html/pdwiz.asp

How to create a COM-add in using Visual Basic:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dno2kta/html/trcomad.asp


You will soon realize that creating the program is the least
of your problem, finding the customers are much harder.
Here are some suggestions:

1. Continue develop the *nix-version as freeware and use it to advertise
your other version with something like "Do you want you mother
to get rid of spam, use the Outlook-version". Advertise the
open version on Freshmeat and similar.
2. Make a Mozilla version as freeware, people who use Mozilla
will not buy software from you anyway :-)
3. Advertise on the net at locations where you pay per click,
or even better, you pay depending on how much people on that
site buy from you. (little risk)

Cost to get you starting:
1. A lot of your free time
2. Visual Studio, (v5 or 6 is enough, you can buy second hand)
3. An extra computer to test installation and similar 
(You need to test on clean machines and under differnent version
of windows)

/mattias

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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Alessandro Baretta]

Mattias Waldau wrote:
>>I don't agree. My customers pay me to develop server
>>software on *nix, where the clients just happen to be Linux 
>>boxes but might just as well be windows boxes, for all I 
>>care. And I'm paid pretty well actually.
> 
> 
> Sounds more that you work as a paid consultant, so you make a 
> living by selling hours, not software. Making a living as a 
> consultant is much easier. I have also done that, but then 
> you can't decide what you would like to do, and you can't select
> the programming language of your choice.

Not exactly. I sell, deploy and run Linux based information 
systems.

> What I meant was creating commercial software, where the bulk of
> the revenue is on the licenses of the program. 
> Much higher risk than the consultant, but you are your own boss.
> (And you can use O'Caml, because your customers don't care)

The customers ask for features. I have to give them to them. 
They don't even *know* what language I am using.

> For example, someone knowledgable in O'Caml could take
> Spam Oracle by Xavier Leroy and improve it and package
>  ... <intersting suggestions on how to make commercial
 > Windows software>

It's not really the kind of business I'm interested in. I 
don't really like the idea of writing commercial software. I 
greatly prefer to write free software and sell it 
nonetheless. I *feel* better. I think that I'd get sick and 
get covered with green warts if I gave up Ocaml for VC++ ;-)

Alex

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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Dmitry Bely]

"Mattias Waldau" <mattias.waldau@abc.se> writes:

> For example, someone knowledgable in O'Caml could take
> Spam Oracle by Xavier Leroy and improve it and package
> it for MS Outlook. You can probably sell it for $29, so
> if you sell more than a few thousand licenses per year,
> you make a living. (I think there is about one billion
> PC's and more that one hundred million MS Office
> users out there). Try to find a couple of thousand Linux
> users who are willing to pay, not even the Linux 
> distributors succeed in that :-)
>
>
> (I haven't checked the licensing of Spam Oracle, so ask
> Xavier Leroy first.)
>
>
> It will probably difficult for you to make everything
> using O'Caml, you will need C++ or VB.

No. I don't see why creating COM components in Ocaml is a problem.

- Dmitry Bely


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RE: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Mattias Waldau]

> > It will probably difficult for you to make everything
> > using O'Caml, you will need C++ or VB.
> 
> No. I don't see why creating COM components in Ocaml is a problem.
> 
> - Dmitry Bely

For a windows-less COM-component you are right. If the component needs a
user interface
there are different solutions, for example Harry Chomsky's ocaml-win32,
or using VBA for the
user interface (but then you will probably have problem with Outlook
Express).

/mattias

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Re: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry

[Jonathan Coupe]

www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/euc00-sendmail.html

Interested parties might want to look at this article, written by a
(non-Ericson) team that decided to use Erlang for an industrial project.
Reading a software marketing book like "Inside The Tornado" might be
interesting too.

- Jonathan Coupe


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What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Mattias Waldau]

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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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Markus Mottl]

On Sun, 01 Sep 2002, Mattias Waldau wrote:
> 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 :-).

No need to feel sorry! I work in a place privileged enough that I can
let Windows rot in benign neglect... ;-)

In any case, the main issue of making PCRE work on Windows is the
C-library, for which you need a C-compiler and linker. The OCaml-part
should work out-of-the-box. It's therefore not so much a problem caused
by INRIA but by Microsoft not shipping standard development tools with
their operating systems.

> So if you want O'Caml to be used by commercial developers creating
> commercial software, make sure that your libraries work on windows.

Well, even with those difficulties put in our way by Microsoft, people
obviously manage to get around them.

> 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.

Unfortunately, not everbody has as much choice as we have...

Regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl                                             markus@oefai.at
Austrian Research Institute
for Artificial Intelligence                  http://www.oefai.at/~markus
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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Alessandro Baretta]

Mattias Waldau wrote:
 > 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".

I don't agree. My customers pay me to develop server
software on *nix, where the clients just happen to be Linux
boxes but might just as well be windows boxes, for all I
care. And I'm paid pretty well actually.

I am not using only O'Caml. As I am developing a data
centric application, I use SQL and XML tools extensively.
Presently, PXP is a very strong XML parser, but it lacks
support for XSLT (XSchema would be nice, too), so I am
forced to go with Xalan of the Apache foundation.

The bottom line is: 1) you don't need to develop Windows
software to make money, and 2) you'd better focus on writing
high quality code with high quality software development tools.

BTW, I'd gladly give up XSLT and SQL if, respectively, we
had a pseudo-official XML transformation API for Ocaml, and
there were Caml server-side bindings with PostgreSQL. In the
first place, I'd be able to statically typecheck my XML
transformation code. In the second place, I'd be able to
write type safe queries in such complex contexts where
baseline SQL is insufficent and the generality of pl/pgSQL
is needed.

Alex


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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Gerd Stolpmann]

Am 2002.09.02 14:43 schrieb(en) Alessandro Baretta:

> BTW, I'd gladly give up XSLT and SQL if, respectively, we
> had a pseudo-official XML transformation API for Ocaml, and

What do you mean with "pseudo-official"?

A remark as developer of free software: One of the advantages
is that I can do what I want, nobody forces me to develop in a
certain way, or direction. Free software is basically software 
without standards. Industry needs standards to make their
products interchangeable, but this is not a key point for free
software, because you have the sources, and you have some
control over them. PostgreSQL is the best example for this;
originally it did not support SQL, but had some unique features
other DBMS did not have. As a user you get the benefits of the
freedom of the developers, but at the price of lacking secondary
virtues such as standard-conformance.

Why don't we have a generally accepted XML transformation API?
It would not be very much work to develop such an API, and to
do a prototype for an implementation. I suppose that auch an
API is not really needed, at least now.

> there were Caml server-side bindings with PostgreSQL. In the
> first place, I'd be able to statically typecheck my XML
> transformation code. In the second place, I'd be able to
> write type safe queries in such complex contexts where
> baseline SQL is insufficent and the generality of pl/pgSQL
> is needed.

Gerd
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann * Viktoriastr. 45 * 64293 Darmstadt * Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
------------------------------------------------------------
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Re: What kind of industry do you mean? (Was: [Caml-list] objective caml and industry)

[Oleg]

On Sunday 01 September 2002 05:18 am, Mattias Waldau wrote:
> 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.

Client software in O'Caml? What type? Are you planning to or selling it 
already?

Cheers
Oleg
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