Open Clean Source

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

	I also believe that commercial interests would rather suggest to
	release the clean sources. For making profit it does not count if
	you sell a compiler or the support. What counts are number of
	people buying it. And an open clean would definitely increase the
	number of users. Non of those companies selling Linux staff or
	commercial latex could make their living today if the sources were
	not released in the past.
	
There's another *commercial* reason for releasing the source,
possibly under a GNU-ish licence that would prevent unauthorised
releases.

Two days ago the AMI insurance company sent me a fat little booklet
all about the Y2K bug, what it is, what might be affected by it and
what will not, and above all, why they and other insurance companies
are NOT going to insure against it.  I'm sure civilisation will
survive the Y2K bug.  I'm equally sure that product liability lawyers
will become rich and that insurance companies will decide that just
as they are not in general willing to insure a ship or a building
that has not been properly inspected, they *will* take money for
insuring against program-related losses *only* if the programs are
certified by an independent inspector or by their own.  We've already
_had_ the Y1999 bug biting.  Telecom NZ have just announced that their
entire network of pay phones is not Y2K compliant.  But after _that_,
there's Microsoft's nice little April 2001 bug, there's the 2038 bug
waiting, there are lots of them lurking around, and there is a *vast*
collection of Unicode-related bugs waiting to be installed.

So in 2002 the Clean Green Dating Agency has developed the world's
best dating software, and it's bet-your-business time.  Their code
is written in Clean, so it's small, readable, and reliable, and they
let the inspector see it.  They're running on Linux, so the
inspector is happy with that.  *But* they can't show the inspector
the Clean compiler.  "Go away and rewrite it in Haskell", she says.