On Tuesday 16 March 2004 12:13, you wrote:
On Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004, at 00:25 Europe/London, Paulo Jorge de
Is PolyML development dead? Is it safe to keep developing ML programs dependent on PolyML compiler?
Finally, Poly/ML is open-source. If someone wants a feature in Poly/ML badly enough they can always add it themselves.
...
If it seems sensible I'll add it to the source I maintain at polyml.org. The same goes for documentation. Although I maintain the version on polyml.org there's nothing to stop anyone else from distributing their version.
Apart from this, perhaps? "If you are downloading this in order to make it available to others, for example to install it on a server at your University or place of work, you agree that everyone who has use of Poly/ML will abide by this licence." [1]
That surely can't be feasible.
I'm happy to work with anyone who wants to do development work.
Yet, when asked about the issues relating to the license you don't answer? [2] For the sake of curiosity - was the license chosen, or was it imposed by a university IPR policy?
My interest is the result of frustration at the lack of easily available (by that I guess I mean tidily packaged) formal methods tools. While evaluating potential tool support for my PhD work, I have in several cases spent longer installing tools than using them. (I dread to how long it will take to reinstall on a new machine...)
There seem to be many examples of such tools not being easily distributable to a broad(er) community because of license problems: - HOL4 has a BSD license, but it depends on MoscowML (which some copyright issues) - NuSMV (LGPL) depends on a BDD library, with no license information - Isabelle (whose license appears to allow distribution) depends on PolyML (whose license doesn't appear to - see above) - LETOS, I think, had similar problems, but I gave up on it a long time ago.
Of course, this is all just two cents of off-topic rant - and most of the questions here are slightly rhetorical - but I can't be the first to have had these problems? FWIW, I'm sure I would have offered contributions if it wasn't for these problems.
Martin Ellis
[1] http://www.polyml.org/Get.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00016.html