Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Lisp and the right to make a dollar

There’s a whole big discussion on comp.lang.lisp that I became aware of through a posting on Lemonodor and further commentary by Dan Moniz. All I can say is: Get a freaking grip guys! How someone licenses their software is their decision, and whether you like it or not only affects whether you give them money, not whether you have to respect it.

If I want to give something away—and I have given away a lot of bits of code over the years—then that’s my choice. If I want to charge, then that’s also my choice. This kind of back-biting is totally counter-productive to both the problem at hand, as well as the Lisp community as a whole. There are some outstanding free implementations of Lisp. Are they as “good” as Franz’ Allegro Common Lisp, probably not. But they also don’t cost money, and as my mother once told me: you don’t get what you don’t pay for.

Is ACL expensive? Yes. Is it worth it? Probably. Are the guys at Franz flexible and interested in working with you? Yes, totally. They, along with the gang at Cincom are very flexible in coming up with licensing terms that make sense for everyone at the table. They want to make money, but they also understand that they don’t make money if you aren’t making money. Having said that, I think that Franz should follow along with Cincom’s lead in offering a non-commercial release that is free and without any limits other than its non-commercial bits. Even if they can’t include all their doo-dads and gee-gaws (due to paying other people money for licensing), they could probably share most of it. If not, perhaps it makes sense to share with the community why they can’t do that.

Just a few thoughts. We don’t live in a world where anything is truly free of cost—everything has a price—even if you don’t bear the brunt of it.