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 TAA06524 for caml-red; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 19:45:19 +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 CAA25604 for ; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 02:50:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from miss.wu-wien.ac.at (miss.wu-wien.ac.at [137.208.107.17]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f181oW908811; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 02:50:32 +0100 (MET) Received: (from mottl@localhost) by miss.wu-wien.ac.at (8.9.0/8.9.0) id BAA22682; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 01:45:21 +0100 (MET) Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 01:45:21 +0100 From: Markus Mottl To: Alex Baretta Cc: Michel.Mauny@inria.fr, Ocaml Mailing List Subject: Re: R: Consortium Caml Message-ID: <20010208014519.A13836@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> References: <000201c090f4$0f5013a0$18ab6ed4@alex> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <000201c090f4$0f5013a0$18ab6ed4@alex>; from alex@baretta.com on Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 23:55:31 +0100 Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr On Mon, 05 Feb 2001, Alex Baretta wrote: > Why not allow individuals to join for about 50E per annum. No one > says such individuals should have as much weight as the 2kE members, > but yet they would contribute to the funding of project and to the > diffusion of the language. I also think that the minimum fee of 2kE is too high. It is clear that there should be a minimum fee that is set reasonably high enough so that INRIA's expenses with maintaining someone's membership are covered (+ some extra money). Why not create a virtual stock exchange for member votes? For fun we once tried something like this for a different purpose: students complained about the lack of disk space at our department (is this so much different from lack of features in the OCaml distribution?). Due to lack of departmental funds (you know this situation, do you? ;) we were forced to open a "disk space stock exchange": We had an IPO (i.e. we had bought a disk from our own money), students bought the space on the primary market and could trade it on a web page (with limit orders). This scheme went *surprisingly* well (Adam Smith, look down on us! ;) Some students immediately started speculating, which (as it is on "real" markets) reduced the overall market risk: initial price fluctations evened out fast. When the price was high enough again (ever increasing numbers of OCaml-users, eh, students...), we would issue further space on the primary market (after buying new disks). The story eventually ended (after about three years), because of subsequent disk crashes, which ruined the market's trust in our competence to buy good equipment and made them invest elsewhere (well, disappointing investors with bad management (or technical!) decisions is always a bad idea ;) Maybe this funny suggestion seems unreasonable to you, but one shouldn't forget that "real" stock worth trillions of dollars is traded this way each day and it seems to work well in general. This would be a true incentive for the OCaml-community to liquefy some money, because it wouldn't just be a "donation" but an "investment". It would also be an incentive for INRIA to do what the market community considers reasonable: the price says whether the community is content or not - a very transparent way of voting. Why not hand this project (creation of IT-infrastructure, working out market mechanisms and legal aspects) to a group of CS, business/economics and law students (as some kind of seminar work)? In our experience students are pretty eager to participate in such weird things and usually come up with solutions that work remarkably well (and their work is cheap! ;) Regards, Markus Mottl -- Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl