I can't find it at the moment, but I remember reading somewhere that Franz's support team goes way above and beyond what other vendors are willing to do. Supposedly, their developers work very closely with you, if necessary, in order to get the most out of the product. To the point of helping you write code in your own app. It's not so bad having a team of experts at your disposal when you're trying to scale your startup app that suddenly became popular overnight. I think the licensing terms are negotiated on a case by case basis too so the royalties thing may not be set in stone.

It's certainly understandable why people would be turned off by their license, but it's not necessarily a bad deal. It also says a lot that Franz has been in business as long as they have with this type of license. The customers who have signed on must be getting something worthwhile out of it.

It has been quite a long time since I last looked into Franz' licensing terms, but I believe the royalty applies only if you distribute a product which contains the Allegro CL runtime. In other words, if you write a Lisp application, using Allegro CL, and you deliver it to a customer, then the customer effectively has a copy of Allegro CL. Franz wants to be compensated for this. If you wrote a server-side product, then Allegro CL is expensive, yes, but you just pay for the number of licenses you need. No royalties, as far as I know.

Quite. I for one will never use there stuff. And since I want to use CL and allegro graph that's a bit of a pain. I hope they go bust.

If that's true, it's really nice! Just like voluntarily implanting a blood sucking parasite into your neck.

This is totally off topic... Is it really necessary to mod someone down to -8? Sure, the comment deserved to be modded down, but isn't -1 or -2 enough? At that point the font changes to light gray and you can barely see it anyway. It seems like modding it down after that is just beating a dead horse. I could understand if it was offensive, but this is a typical stupid comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion.