Aardvark Language Discussion

The basic elements of the language: the compiler and built-in types, should be free; simply because it would be impractical to make them otherwise. The rest of the SDK should cost a minor fee (for example 100$) per workstation. For open source development, education, public research, and almost any other use apart from commercial software development it should be free.
The reason for this is that especially the Java-SDK, have been rather meager, for example: It has no method to just unzip a zip-file in a location; a file has to be unzipped 'manually'. The components in the awt and swing packages are rather deficient. The whole kit has many bugs that have been reported a long time ago but never fixed. Moreover a major overhaul has never been made to version 2.0; instead it makes do with deprecated methods and obsolete classes.
This is essentially an example of 'the tragedy of the commons'. A company, Sun or Oracle, has to put money into development, just to give it away for free. The maintainer of the SDK has no real incentive to invest what it takes to develop a proper development kit. A minor fee for the SDK, and the creation of a nonprofit organization, would fix this.

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