I'm not making him a saint. Stallman completely abandoned the Lisp community at that point - he won't even talk about Lisp now (at least he told me to go away last time I tried talking to him about it).

What I'm saying is Stallman is right about the value of Free Software. CMUCL and BSD basically got released the way they did because they were university research projects that failed to get commercialized. Stallman is really the person that came out and said Free Software should be a priority in and of itself and not an accident. That totally changed the way you can think about software, and you shouldn't discount that.

Another thing I respect about Stallman is that he tends to be right about longer-term trends. I don't bet against him anymore.

CMUCL was a research project and DARPA financed. Commercializing it was not the main goal. CMUCL got funding for many years (until 1994), when it was open source already. CMU promoted 'free' software in a huge way in many projects. They also provided the CMU AI repository which collected all available university research software in AI, including language implementations.

It was not the Stallman version of 'free' software with a viral license.

Most people fail to understand the role of DARPA funding. Stallman worked in a DARPA (= military) lab - the MIT AI Lab. He worked basically on new software infrastructure for the military. They funded it to get intelligent software for guided missiles, logistics systems, missile defense systems, simulators, training systems, ... The largest batch of Lisp Machines went into the Star Wars project. Promotion of 'free software' was not a DARPA priority, but DARPA was interested to get these tools widely used in Universities. DARPA financed a batch of a hundred Lisp Machines (IIRC) for example and gave them to universities. At the same time they promoted competition, to have more than one source for the technology - so LMI and TI also got money.

Stallman has his definition of 'free software', which shows in the GPL license. Others have their idea of free software which shows in the use of 'Public Domain' as the license. To me the Public Domain Lisps were always more important than the GPLed ones.

Doesn't that reinforce his point? CMUCL & SBCL were released as free software and are still around. Genera isn't.

I haven't said anything against his point. It is just that claiming that Stallman was the only one 'getting free software' is bullshit. He did a lot, but in the Lisp community there were many others which promote(d) free software.

Also Stallman did promote Free software, but his promotion of Lisp was mostly limited to Emacs Lisp. There was an attempt with Guile, but that was mostly it. He had worked with the Lisp Machine, but once he was out, that topic was finished.

Anyway, I find a few points are right and several others not. That Symbolics would have not gone out of business if Genera would have been free software and portable is speculation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. For example Franz is still around, though Allegro CL is not free software. There are lots of free software / portable Lisp implementations which are as dead as Genera, or more than dead. I agree that it might help, but not more.

I agree with the following: portability and 'free' can help with survival.

I don't think adding C to Lisp is of much help. The mismatch is huge. There are two options: 1) repeating the design of the past (with the same problems and maybe slight improved. There has been lots of talk and little action. It's difficult because we don't have the hackers with knowledge and time for that. 2) doing a new design which gets rid of the limitations of past designs (single user, single image, no security, ...). That's even more difficult.

"That Symbolics would have not gone out of business if Genera would have been free software and portable is speculation."

Two different things. I was claiming that Genera would still be around if it was Free Software - this is by virtue of definition. Symbolics being in and out of business has nothing to do with it.

A totally different thing is that I think Symbolics stood a very good chance of surviving if it had made its software more portable. It's a good thing you mention Franz, because they're almost as old as Symbolics, and still around, largely due to the fact that their system is easily portable. They don't waste immense amounts of engineering resources on supporting platforms, but dedicate it to improving features and performance and more importantly responding to customer needs.

"1) repeating the design of the past (with the same problems and maybe slight improved. There has been lots of talk and little action. It's difficult because we don't have the hackers with knowledge and time for that."

It's difficult to do because when you get down to it, Zetalisp sucked for systems programming. Portable Standard Lisp, Interlisp, CMUCL/Allegro/Clozure (anything with LAP and VOPs) provide a much better model for how to build a Lisp runtime.

It's also difficult to do because people like to waste their time imagining how awesome hardware type-checking on FPGAs would be and how the new Lisp OS will have super-duper database-backed storage and network transparency and etc. etc.

"2) doing a new design which gets rid of the limitations of past designs (single user, single image, no security, ...). That's even more difficult."

The key is the namespace. Symbol identity needs to be preserved across users/processes, symbol values don't. This is actually a much simpler problem than you assume.

Zetalisp sucked for systems programming? That's a pretty strong word. Have you ever used it at all?

I doubt that Allegro CL is easier to port than Open Genera.

As a means to the end of getting a working system done sooner rather than later, and most especially supporting a zillion device drivers that will never be ported to a Lisp, C in Lisp may make sense.

Only if you can integrate it in a useful way and reuse C code from other places. Which I doubt is possible.

We shouldn't cherry pick only the examples which support our position. E.g. Allegro Common Lisp has traditionally been about as unfree as possible (e.g. $$$ required to distribute solutions to your customers (for the Lisp runtime)) and it's still around. LispWorks is three years older and is still around.

Also, would the MIT Lisp Machine system or Genera have gotten as good as they did as fast as they did without outside funding (government and VC respectively)?

Or look at the failure of GNU to produce a kernel.

My general point here is that all this is much more complicated that a simple "free survives, unfree doesn't" ... although I'd need a few good examples of unfree dying to round out it out (good as in perhaps "was big, then totally failed").

"E.g. Allegro Common Lisp has traditionally been about as unfree as possible (e.g. $$$ required to distribute solutions to your customers (for the Lisp runtime)) and it's still around."

Franz started only a few years after Symbolics. I believe one of the key reasons they're still around is because their Lisp system is easily portable.

"Also, would the MIT Lisp Machine system or Genera have gotten as good as they did as fast as they did without outside funding (government and VC respectively)?"

Stallman was totally right about Symbolics though - they took all of their Lisp work and most of the Lisp community to their grave. There wasn't a lot preventing them from making their software more portable or open, but they made a business decision not to do that, which proved to be disastrous in the long term.

"Or look at the failure of GNU to produce a kernel."

That's because there's already other, better Free Software alternatives out there. Why work on HURD when you can work on Linux or one of the BSDs? And it's important to note that it's a continuing failure - because the project is Free Software, people can continue to work on it if they want.

Symbolics also had developed a portable Lisp, but closed it. They developers then develop it externally, it was developed and sold as Lucid CL. Lucid CL was highly portable, but the company also did not survive.

Symbolics' problem was not that their software was not portable. Open Genera is a VM and ran on DEC Alpha, it would have been possible to port it to other 64bit machines.

But the business went away. The thing was too costly. It was also not just a Lisp implementation, but a portable OS. As an OS it simply did too much: own networking, own window system, ...

The reason why Franz is still around and Symbolics' is not, is not a question of portability - it is because Franz' Lisp is just a Lisp implementation and concentrates on that - where Genera / Open Genera is an OS, which simply does too much. Why run a TCP stack in Lisp on a machine which already has a TCP stack? Why run a window system on a machine which already has one? Plus the rest of the machine does not benefit from that. If the other software could use the Lisp TCP stack, but it can't.

Saying that Genera was portable because Open Genera was there is like saying that MS DOS is portable because there's QEMU.

Or like any other language implementation with a language-oriented virtual machine: Java/JVM, CLISP, SQUEAK, ...

But Open Genera isn't a language-oriented VM, it's an Ivory emulator. There's a huge difference.

The Ivory is a language oriented processor - not a computer. It's a CPU, a chip. Where is the difference? Open Genera also does not emulate an Ivory-based computer, but the processor mostly. It emulates the instruction set.

http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html