Subject: Re: A Philosophical Diversion
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/10/08
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3116868671059367@naggum.no>

* "James A. Crippen" <crippenj@saturn.math.uaa.alaska.edu>
| On a side note, a prof at my university was thinking of conniving Franz
| into selling him a couple licenses for ACL for WinNT at low cost so he
| could use them to teach Lisp classes.  This campus is unfortunately
| primarily a Win?? and VMS place (isn't it horrid?) with only the very
| occasional unix box, so students aren't used to having to deal with unix
| in any functional way (beyond running pine).  Having a Win version of
| Lisp would help these people continue to avoid unix, and allow them to
| learn Lisp alone, thus saving much wasted class time.  So does anyone off
| the top of their head know if Franz does educational licensing at cheap,
| preferably free prices?

  well, I thought it was a crying shame that the NT version was priced
  lower than the Unix versions, but then Franz Inc announced that Linux is
  a supported platform at the same price as NT, in addition to making the
  environment available to Linux users on a trial basis without charge.  to
  me, this is a very nice gesture to a community who deserves attention.

  if you buy into Bill Gates' propaganda and rhetoric by buying NT, you
  should also _pay_ for that choice.  _nothing_ comes for free under his
  regime.  remember, sharing software under Unix is a matter of posting
  _source_ to USENET and the Internet in general, while sharing software
  under Bill Gates' totalitarian regime is a matter of binary distribution
  of crippleware and paying "small" amounts of money to get uncrippled
  versions, and you never get the source.  the mind-sets are so different
  it should be impossible to imagine that a company would want to provide
  people with free versions of _anything_ under Windows.  that you don't
  get a file compiler in the demo version under Windows is just what I'm
  talking about, and it's entirely fair.

  it should be a major goal of every conscientious being on this planet to
  help anybody and everybody avoid Microsoft products.  I hope Franz Inc
  denies you the opportunity to "help these people continue to avoid Unix",
  at least without purchasing an educational site license.

  incidentally, all they will need to learn under Linux is the Emacs/Lisp
  Interface to Allegro CL.  it's trivial for a reasonably competent system
  administrator to set up the machines so the users will fire up Emacs and
  Emacs will fire up Allegro CL when they log in and just land them in the
  listener, all ready to visit Lisp files and enjoy the benefits of working
  in a _programming_ environment instead of an end-user environment.  a
  university that has VMS systems _must_ have reasonably competent system
  administrators, but I wouldn't bet any money on a place that used NT.

#:Erik