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A few more cents



IBUKI as you all know has explicitly chosen NOT to provide CLIM to its
customers.  We believe that the Lisp vendors have NO business trying to
duplicate all the 100s of man years that the larger community has put
into UIs.  In our view not even a consortium of Lisp vendors can afford
to duplicate this effort.  What we as vendors should be doing is to make
it easier for our users to take advantage of the other commercial UIs.

To flame a minute at user's: life is simple for a vendor.  If you do NOT
want to pay for something, then you should NOT expect your vendor to 
supply it.  Any other point of view on your part amounts to demanding a
gift from your vendor and has the effect of making it just that much 
harder for him to offer you even basic services.  (vendors that cave
in to this kind of pressure seem to have an economic death wish).  The
reason that the Lisp vendors are all looking for other products is that
their own customers are unwilling to pay for some of the best software
that exists.

Each new feature (read here BLOATED X3J13 ideas, CLIM, ...) costs vendors
money to make and support.  Where do you imagine this money needs to come
from if you want these things?  It comes from customers.  I ask you --
how much were you willing to pay for CLOS?  On the other hand did you 
object to paying for C++ (after paying for C).  If you want financially 
healthy Lisp Vendors, stop looking for the cheapest way out.  Either
Lisp (or CLOS or CLIM or whatever) is worth the bucks to you or you 
will find that even the Lisp vendors will stop subsidising your Lisp 
hobby (habit?).

The Lisp community is very lucky to have such a passionate collection 
of Vendors.  Symbolics, Lucid, Franz, Harlequin, Venue, Gold Hill,
IBUKI, ... all still here after 5 or six years, when from a financial
point of view the Lisp companies are marginal.  If Lisp isn't worth 
it tell us NOW.

Richard Weyhrauch
President
IBUKI



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