[Ocaml-biz] What does a Showcase Project need to be?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

[bloody keystrokes!  premature send]

We have this idea of putting together a toolbox so that 'Showcase
Projects' get written for a given market.  Generally speaking, we have a
hand-wavy idea that these 'Showcase Projects' will somehow increase
OCaml's popularity.  But, we haven't really defined what these Showcases
do, or what exactly they need to be.  Do they need to be open sourced?
Do they need to be licensed in a particular way?  Do they need to be
'killer apps' ?  Do they need to be under our personal control, so that
we ourselves can promote them?  If they're driven by somebody else, what
kinds of characteristics must the driving organization have?

Showcasing must have a strategy behind it.  We need to define this
strategy much better than we have.

We need to start by evaluating all the entries at the list of
Significant Applications.
http://caml.inria.fr/users_programs-eng.html
This will give us some ideas about what Showcases might 'have legs' and
what might not.  For instance, as a first and obvious statement: if a
project has a poor webpage, unresponsive authors, and isn't licensed
open source, it is of no use.  We couldn't market such a thing at all.

If you still have energy after looking at all the Significant
Applications, you could look at the various Python Success Stories for
further ideas of what might be 'impressive' or not.
http://www.pythonology.com/success
http://www.python-in-business.org/success/
The ones I'm most likely to wave under someone's nose are:

- ILM uses Python for their rendering farms
- Google uses Python for their search engines
- Ultima Online uses Python for their MMORPG servers
- Humongous Entertainment used Python for children's adventure titles

Of course, this is because ILM, Google, Ultima Online, and Humongous are
important, not Python.  Securing 'big hitters' might be a goal.  Nothing
on the list of OCaml Significant Applications counts as a 'big hitter'
like that.  That one Microsoft project and the Lindows project might
count as 'little hitters', there's some brand name recognition there,
but I bet those aren't very big projects.  The ILM, Google, and Ultima
Online stuff are all ***HUGE*** projects, and the Humongous titles were
well respected commercial releases.

Incidentally, the more I think about how much sheer software has to be
written to popularize something, the more correct I think I was when I
said, it'll be 5 years before OCaml is as popular as Python is
currently.  And, there's nothing we can do about this, it's the
strategic reality.  What we *can* do, is ensure that OCaml has a growth
path and actually *does* become popular in the future.  As opposed to
becoming a 'coulda been' language.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.