Use of Lucid Manual

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

Can you show us the exact language of the agreement that your lawyers
want?

I've been reluctantly coming around to the view that the easiest way to
proceed is for me to write a new specificaton document from scratch.
I'd rather spend time writing than hassling with lawyers.  This document
would be copyrighted by me personally, with an agreement (informal or in
writing, whatever people are happy with) that I will try to make it
reflect precisely the decisions of the technical committee and that I
will handle the rights to this work in accordance with the wishes of the
combined technical and steering committees.  We could decide to turn the
copyright over to ANSI or whatever later on.  I would not be interested
in getting any money out of this, though if I do the work I would like
to keep my name on the thing in some prominent position -- it helps my
employers at CMU to appreciate that I'm doing SOMETHING with my time.

Given the amount of work this would entail, the document would be as
terse, precise, and technical as I can make it.  There would very
definitely be a place for a friendlier manual, perhaps a second edition
of Steele if he wants to create one, but we would all agree that this
new thing is the definitive spec.

To make the MIT contingent happy, it would be done initially in vanilla
80-column ASCII, though we'd probably convert it to TeX at the end.

I'd still prefer to start with Steele's manual or with Lucid's, but that
is looking less and less like a live option.

-- Scott