From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA21612 for caml-red; Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:25:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA07717 for ; Thu, 1 Feb 2001 18:43:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from quincy.inria.fr (quincy.inria.fr [128.93.8.52]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f11HhAn16602; Thu, 1 Feb 2001 18:43:10 +0100 (MET) Received: (from mauny@localhost) by quincy.inria.fr (8.10.1/8.10.1) id f11NiXk26452; Thu, 1 Feb 2001 18:44:33 -0500 Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 18:44:33 -0500 From: Michel Mauny To: "Joshua D. Guttman" Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: Consortium Caml Message-ID: <20010201184433.A26243@quincy.inria.fr> Reply-To: Michel.Mauny@inria.fr References: <20010126163821.A4855@quincy.inria.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from guttman@mitre.org on Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 03:34:42PM -0500 Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr Joshua D. Guttman wrote/écrivait (Jan 31 2001, 03:34PM -0500): > I wonder whether it would be possible to explain the proposed > activities of the consortium in more detail. The Consortium members will meet at least twice a year. They will have the opportunity to identify common needs (libraries, for instance), and their contribution to the Consortium (money) will be used to satisfy those needs (e.g. implement these libraries). The Consortium could also decide to organize or support events such as a Caml workshop (open to everyone), for instance. > How does it differ from this mailing list, for instance? Of course, this won't affect the mailing list. But the money collected by the Consortium will be first used to fulfill the needs of the Consortium members. Being of general interest, the result should be beneficial to the whole Caml community. > So I would like to have my organization join the consortium. This would be great. > However, to get authorization to spend a couple thousand euros, I need > to be able to explain exactly what the benefits to the company will > be. How shall I explain this? The first idea of the Consortium is to put people together and to have enough money to hire an engineer giving a hand to the development of Caml. The second one is that this group of members will identify urgent needs common to most of them (and consistent with the language and implementation) to be addressed using the money of the Consortium. The developments that members need will have a kind of higher priority. Of course, the Caml developers will still work for all Caml users, but the manpower supported by the Consortium should work to fulfill the members' needs. Note that these developments will be released as Open Sourse, as the rest of the system. The overall idea is to have a strong group of motivated users, willing and working to facilitate the development of applications written in Caml, and to extend the Caml user base. In some time from now, the group of Caml users could be large enough to represent a reasonable market and to attract companies willing to offer OCaml training, consulting, ... Managers should then feel more comfortable if Caml is used in their companies, and this should ensure the language's continuity. > I'd also ask whether the cost may be a trap. Is 2,000 euros per > member enough to make a big difference to INRIA? The big difference is when we can hire someone (an engineer, not a researcher) to do Caml development most of his/her time. INRIA is a research institution, and some developments, although needed to do serious Caml programming, don't belong to research. > Would it be better to have a fee of say 500 euros, which may lead to > many more members? Well, we had to choose an amount for the first option, and I don't know wether it's easier to have 100 members giving each 500 Euros or to have 25 giving each 2 KEuros (or even less giving even more :-). I chose the latter, and only the experience will tell if it works this way or not. I hope my arguments can be convincing. Everyone is welcome to improve them in such a way that we can soon have, in this list, a thread entitled "convincing management to switch to Ocaml", with positive answers. -- Michel