Docmenting the decisions

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

I have now received a hrdcopy of the Lucid manual, and it looks like a
good starting point for the ANSI document, assuming that RPG's lawyers
can work out a release on the rights that will still retain for Lucid
the right to use their own work.  The book is organized as a chunk of
introductory text on each chapter, followed by alphabetical listings of
functions and variables in that section, one per page.

We would have to remove a modest amount of Lucid-specific stuff, and put
in a fair amount of work to indicate the range of permissible variation
on some issues -- Lucid's book just says what their Lisp does.  Some of
the introductory sections will have to be beefed up a bit, and the right
to incorporate some excepts from Steele's book would be valuable here.
A lot of these things Guy got just right.

Let me propose that the following thigns take place int he next 10 days
while I'm out of town:

1. Bob Mathis will communicate with the ANSI and ISO people and find out
whether the following kinds of status for a spec document are
acceptable to them:

(a) A public-domain document.  Anyone would be able to print this and we
couldn't use legal means to prevent them from modifying it.  But if the
copy came from us or from ANSI, people would know it is definitive.  I
favor this option if we can do it this way -- gets the lawyers out of
the loop for good.

(b) A document copyrighted by a small non-profit corporation set up
specifically for this purpose (e.g. The Common Lisp Ad Hoc Technical
Committee, Inc.).  We would prefer not to assign the copyright to ANSI,
but would of course grant to ANSI and to the rest of the community
blanket permission to reproduce the document without making hidden
modifications.  Blanket permission would also be given for incorporating
the document into online documentation.

(c) Some other scheme of their choice.

2. RPG will continue his efforts to find a way to release the version
modified by the technical committee into the public domain (or to
assign the copyright to this new organization), while retaining for
Lucid the rights they need.

3. Steele will ask Digital Press if they are willing to grant permission
for this document to incorporate substantial excerpts from the Digital
Press book (but less than 30% of it), given that the result is to be
handled as 1a or 1b.

Suitable acknowledgement would of course be given to the contribution of
Lucid and Digital Press.  I don't think the other companies cna object
to that, though if the document is public domain they could quietly
leave this off in their own copies.  We would encourage other companies
not to do this, however.

Once all this is settled, I'm willing to collect the files at CMU and
start to roll on this.  It seems reasonable to me that we set a goal of
September 1 for having a document with the backlog of small problems
cleaned up, and that we try to settle everything else and get a document
to ANSI by Dec 31, 1986.  But we need to discuss this schedule further.

Someone on the steering committee needs to take charge of this business
of collecting the names of all participating companies.  We may also
want to hold elections soon within the committess, as we'll have to tell
ANSI what our sturcutre is.

-- Scott