An idea worth considering??

From: Deepankar Sharma (deepankar.sharma_at_gmail.com)
Date: 10/31/04 

Date: 30 Oct 2004 22:54:37 -0700

Allegro 7 seems to be out. And the trial seems to be
around the corner.

Given that the Lisp community is not large by way of
numbers (its wonderfully diverse though) i think it
would be a good idea, i think it would make a lot
of sense for the commercial implementations to endorse
a dual license (like mySQL). Where in essence,
the usage is free for personal / non commercial use.

In the longer run, i think this would pay back
by letting the people who are writing libraries work
with versions without heap limits ( I tried working
on a game framework on ACL 6.2 unsuccessfully, because
just loading the opengl extensions (that franz was kind
enough to send me) exceeded the heap limit. In another
post i also remember the Cell developers hitting a similar
limit on the Lispworks trial on Mac OSX. This would also
put a definitive end to the newbie question of which
Lisp IDE is best for me. People starting today (myself
included) find it a bit daunting to get around emacs.
(No offence meant, i know it can do great things, and
be wonderfully productive). I feel given the small volumes
the Lisp community has, these two factors would lead to
an environment, where everyone wins. The vendors by an
increased User Base, the new users with good GUI lisps,
the experienced users with more widely available libraries
and the developers with increased access.

I know, any such decision cannot be enforced upon the
companies involved , but if a large number of (credible) people
endorse this opinion, then who knows.

Hopeful,
Deepankar