[erlang-questions] clarify: Ericsson Erlang vision/strategy

[Bob Ippolito]

On 12/11/07, mog <mogorman@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 17:19 +0100, Andreas Hillqvist wrote:
> > As far as I know, currently Ericsson maintain and develops Erlang/OTP.
> > They have employee professional people that get payed to maintain and
> > develops Erlang/OTP.
> > But is there a risk that Erlang/OTP will be drooped in the future?
> > If Ericsson's would drooped Erlang would the Erlang community sustain
> > the quality of maintains and development of Erlang/OTP?
>
> This uncertainty exists in all free software projects.  The developer or
> in this case company could lose interest and leave the community holding
> the bag.

It's not just free software.

> However there is a fairly large install base and we could come together
> and have a public repo and take over, the code appears to be well
> commented and structured from what little I have read of it, I don't
> think its worth wasting time worrying over.

I agree. If Ericsson was to drop Erlang then I'd hire the Erlang
developers myself and continue development :)

> Not to hijack the thread but it would be really nice and show faith in
> the community if Ericsson moved to svn or some other version control
> (git) that could be opened to the public, and hopefully eventually allow
> for outside committers.

I don't think that's such a big deal. Most Erlang development should
really be happening in third party libraries, and the OTP team has
been doing a pretty good job accepting patches and fixing bugs that
the community provides.

-bob