Documenting...

[Guy Steele <gls@THINK-AQUINAS.ARPA>]

    Date: 3 Apr 1986 14:11-PST
    From: MATHIS@USC-ISIF.ARPA
    ...
    Another issue that has been raised is the copyright and
    availability of the final standard.  In general ANSI holds the
    copyright to their standards.  They also want to encourage the
    use of their standards and don't want copyright problems to stand
    in the way.  When something is in the public domain, there is no
    control over its use.  I think what we are really interested in
    is a pre-arranged, royalty-free permission to use.

    I talked to Cathy Kachurik of X3 about this copyright situation.
    She has already contacted Digital Press and they seem willing to
    turn over the right to produce a derived work.  That would free
    us to use as much or as little from the Steele book as is now
    thought appropriate. ...

I have just spoken with John Osborn of Digital Press on this subject.
He was apparently concerned about whether I was concerned about it--in
other words, the usual problem of obtaining N-person consensus using
only 2-person communications links.  I assured him that I wanted the
ANSI committee to be able to use the contents of CLtL unimpeded.  He
said that Digital Press is agreeable to an arrangement whereby ANSI
receives permission royalty-free to use any or all contents of CLtL for
the purposes of developing a Common Lisp standard (while Digital Press
retains the right to publish present and future editions of the existing
book).  He said Digital Press is still making piles of money on CLtL and
would like to continue to do so, and suggested that future editions
might be more "personal" or "tutorial" or whatever.  I pointed out that
that was reasonable, but also that I would likely be involved in the
ANSI effort as well.  (I still have some concerns about potential
confusion over which book is the official Common Lisp; if CLtL continues
into future editions, I think it must change its character so as not to
be confusable with the ANSI standard.)

Apparently other parts of DEC (Gary Brown's name was mentioned) are
putting mild pressure on Digital Press to cooperate with ANSI, so maybe
it will all go smoothly after all.

If Lucid is still willing to make its text available, then the committee
will have some useful choices about which text to draw on for what
purposes.  (I too would like to see the text, by the way, Dick.)

--Guy

P.S. Lucid's document uses TeX, and I am in process of converting CLtL
 from SCRIBE to TeX, so maybe the committee will want to work with TeX
files.  I have some nifty macros:  all you need to say is

\begin{defun}
complex realpart &optional imagpart

The arguments must be non-complex numbers...
\end{defun}

and the function description headers are formatted (fonts and line
breaks) automatically.  There are similar facilities for macros, etc.
--Q