Subject: Re: A problem statement (and a proposed solution)
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:44:45 -0500
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <PeGdnU5HF52waeTbnZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@speakeasy.net>
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  Cart. Horse. Before.

GORY DETAILS:
JShrager@gmail.com <JShrager@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| How am I planning to make enough money on a lisp-based vertical
| to support a few engineers to gate-keep an open source lisp.
+---------------

You seem to keep missing the point that others have been *trying*
to convey, which is that you *don't* need an open-source Lisp to
accomplish that!! Given all the *other* costs of your "evil plan
for world domination", the cost of an excellent-quality commercial
Lisp is peanuts.

So... Do please go ahead and dominate the world [using a commercial
Lisp], and then go right on ahead use the outrageous profits that you
will reap to develop [or buy] a Lisp to open-source. Trying to do it
the other way round is just... (*grepping for a non-confrontational
way to express it*)... unlikely to succeed.

+---------------
| First I'm going to build an spider that will crawl all linked-up
| web pages and build an inverted index by words. ...eventually have
| billions of pages. Then I'll build a really simple web interface...
| really simple, well understood, heuristic to order the hits...
| How am I planning to make money on this? I'll start just on venture
| funding, but soon I'll let advertisers tell me what words they want
| their ads to appear on, and I'll collect a few cents on click-though
| overhead. This will support building out more and more [stuff]...
+---------------

Uh... dude... you *do* realize that you're just a few years late
to that particular party, hmmm?

    http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html
    http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/bios.cfm

+---------------
| ...but, okay, so I'll pick any of the hundreds of Web 2.0 or
| search business plans that have been funded in the past year.
| Happy now? No, I know, you're going to say: But why is Lisp
| going to make this a success... at which point I throw up my
| hands and realize that I'm arguing with people who just don't
| get the logic of argument and are just arguing because they
| simply don't want to think about the question I asked and would
| rather just make up dumb reasons not to do so.
+---------------

It's because your antecedent is *so* incredible ["beyond belief
or understanding"] that taking it seriously is ludicrous. It's
as if you had asked:

    What would happen if Santa Claus were real and gave me
    $500 million dollars, and I used it to buy a commercial Lisp
    and make it open-sourced?

We could certainly all debate *that* "What would happen if", too,
but it would be a total waste of our time. And face it, few of us
have much time to spare in useless debate these days...

Look, if you have a way to make money with Lisp, *GO DO IT!!*
You don't need a pet open-sourced implementation to do that
with -- given the economics of a startup, a commercial CL is
just fine.[1]  Then use the profits for whatever you like.[2]


-Rob

[1] Though one of the fine existing open-sourced implementations
    might already be good enough for you, depending on your
    business plan.

[2] Buying up some commercial CL & open-sourcing it seems like
    an odd thing to do; but hey, it'll be your money doing it.

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607