Are there any plans in the near future to start merge mining with Devcoin (DVC) and Inter eXchange Coin (IXC) just like Ghash?
Nope.
Seems unfortunate. I would think someone would want to start competing against ghash in every way possible. Obviously it isn't possible to run 0% without a subsidy like Cex backing them.
Not unfortunate really - not if you want a pool with good uptime and a pool op that spends time making sure bitcoin mining runs smoothly rather than fixing devcoin and ixcoin merged mining implementation bugs.
I get that, but if there is one person who could do it well, it would be eleuthria. I would just like to see a strong competitor to ghash, not just people "sacrificing" one feature or another for the sake of the network. Ghash is reporting 47PH/s now. It isn't working out so well...
I'm not sure merged mining coins is the answer. If BTC Guild could offer a low cost PPS variant
(as suggested in a thread by Meni Rosenfeld) in conjunction with some other pools, I think GHash.IO would be in trouble.
I doubt Michael would go back to any form of PPS but I could be wrong, wouldn't hurt to have him look that link over and get back to us though but ya, I feel GHash is hurting a lot of the pools in one form or another.