Subject: Re: bleeding money out of clispers From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 11:59:25 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3201335963285330@naggum.net> * Lyn A Headley > It's a bit harder for me to defend my conditional giving to the MT > project. As you say, I should certainly expect that my money will > not be spent unless there are enough funds built up for the project > to succeed. I honestly believe though, that my conditional offer will > make others more likely to contribute than a non-conditional one, since > the value of whatever pledge they might make is now augmented by the > value of my pledge, and the effect of their not pledging not only results > in the project not getting their money, it deprives the project of my > money as well. For what it might be worth, when I hear somebody make a conditional commitment to something, I also hear strong doubts about its success. When I hear someone asking for X amount of money in order to keep something going (in the case of the only leftist newspaper in this country) or to start something, I may want to commit as much as I can spare in the expectation that if the whole thing is overcommitted, I receive notification of such overcommitment and do not have to commit all that I was prepared to. If, however, somebody gives me the feeling that he will only commit money if everybody else fail to commit sufficient funds, I feel like I would give him all that money. So to me, there is a very sharp distinction in impression left by someone who commits money before or after the condition is set. If you commit the money and want it back if not enough funds are secured, that is fine with me. If you tell me that you withhold funds until the condition is met, I actually interpret that to mean that I should not commit at this time, either. I also believe that marketing a project is about communicating a sense of trust in its success. Nothing says that better than having put up some real money of your own. Of course, you could be lying, but you could also be lying about putting up your share when others have put up theirs. Given the general lack of knowledge of other people's trustworthiness, I am more likely to trust someone who (says he) has already done what he would like others to do, than he who asks others to do it first. Now, more useful than MT in CLISP in my view is support for multiple listeners abd background streams in ILISP. So far, Allegro CL has such an advantage over the others in terms of multiprocessing by virtue of this feature in the Emacs-Lisp Interface alone that they have no real competition. That would be doing something useful with the available multiprocessing support in existing Common Lisp implementations. And how about writing up some specification-quality material for this that could go into some sort of standard? That is also sorely needed. #:Erik -- Travel is a meat thing.