Subject: Re: ACL 6.0 Trial Edition ships with non ANSI reader behavior. From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/11/23 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3183984553414192@naggum.net> * Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org.is.currently.broken> | And that once one of these lesser systems `takes hold' in a project, | it's not necessarily the case that the conformant system offers a huge | advantage *for that project*, even if it's better in some overall | sense that you can use it in all projects. Worse than this, it would probably be easier for the bean-counters among us to favor adding code to the homegrown system at each and every step than to consider what all those steps would cost. | Anyway, I'm not trying to win any battles here... I think we're looking at the threshold-crossing problem. How much do you really _have_ to commit to in order to make a conforming Common Lisp your development system of choice? I think Franz Inc are doing a world of wonder at the high end of the market, and I don't really see the huge problems with licensing or pricing at that end, and I think they are doing a marvelous job in the very low end of the market, that of Trial editions (barring that default Modern cruft, obviously), but going from "Hey, wow, this is _cool_!" to "One Allegro CL Enterprise development license and server license to go, please" is amazingly far and probably so far that any good engineer can figure out a much less expensive way to make _each_ step on his way, but I'm not convinced that he woulud end up spending any less real money in the end -- which leads us to the other problem -- Franz Inc wants too much up front in the default arrangement. (This can be negotiated away, of course, but you have to have enough chutzpah/gall/guts/balls/etc to red-line large portions of a fairly strict license and the message I get from people is that they are _not_ thrilled to have to do this.) What worries me most about all of this is the _combined_ impression of their not caring _that_ much about the specification of ANSI Common Lisp, which means that programmers can no longer use the standard reference works or the standard textbooks, they can no longer just plug into the general Common Lisp community, use open source, etc, and the tendency towards specialization of their market to committed, very large-scale projects. I feel _myself_ falling outside their markets. #:Erik -- Solution to U.S. Presidential Election Crisis 2000: Let Texas secede from the Union and elect George W. Bush their very first President. All parties, states would rejoice.