Re: [Caml-list] Whither the Caml Consortium?

[guttman@mitre.org (Joshua D. Guttman)]

Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr> writes:

>   
>   
>   The current setup of the Consortium is definitely geared towards
>   corporate members, not individuals.  Raising money to fund future
>   developments is one goal of the Consortium, but an equally
>   important goal is to answer the age-old question "what other
>   corporations are using it?" that we get from prospective
>   industrial users.
>   

A corporation is of course not an entity with a single point of view.
The people working on a particular project or in a particular area may
use OCaml, and want to support the Consortium, although their
management may not have much interest.  

For instance, in my own case, I have been using OCaml for several
years, and I have found a few colleagues who now also use it
effectively.  My management tolerates this peculiarity in me, so long
as I am not strident about it.  (:-).  I imagine there are other
people in similar situations.

For people like me, it would be good to have a level of consortium
membership that a single project could justify.  If there was
something in the three figure range (i.e. hundreds but not thousands
of dollars), I would simply make the arrangements and I'd never have
to convince anyone organizationally very distant from me.  But for a
consortium membership that costs thousands, I would have to convince
people I rarely interact with, and they would want to decide whether
OCaml should play some company-wide role, and probably it would be a
dead end.

Would the OCaml Consortium consider something like this?  

Cheers --

        Joshua 



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	Joshua D. Guttman		<guttman@mitre.org> 
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