Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available

Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by sedachv on Sunday November 07, 2010 @12:10PM (#1879745)

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.

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Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available by lispm on Sunday November 07, 2010 @12:29PM (#1879794)

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.

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