[Termtools] Participation & Open Source

[Juergen Giesl]

Dear all,


> if you plan to contribute to the termcomp report, then please do so.
> The current state (still very rough) is in
> http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~waldmann/draft/projekte/termcomp/report08/paper/
> You can get CVS write access, or send text by email to me.

I wrote some parts of this report now. As you can see,
one of my main messages there is that more tools should
participate in as many categories as possible.

In particular, we should also try our best to encourage
tools from other areas (e.g., imperative, logic, and functional
programming) to participate in the competition as well.
At the moment, the competition is very TRS-dominated and
this is not an ideal situation.

This is also an important reason why we should not demand
that participating tools are open-source. If we do that,
then we will impose even more burdens which might prevent
tools from participating. For example, I would very much
welcome tools like "Terminator" to join the competition,
but I cannot imagine that Microsoft would ever be willing
to make this tool open-source just in order to let it
join the competition.

Therefore, I think that (all categories of) the competition
should be open to all tools, not just to ones that are
open-source. We really need more participants and should
do everything to encourage them.

This said, it is of course fine to encourage authors
to make their tools open-source. But it should be just
an encouragement, not a requirement.

Best Regards
Juergen