Licenses for KCL

[rww@ibuki.com (Richard Weyhrauch)]

The recent suggestions on this list from Anthony Burglas are technically 
workable BUT violate the license agreement that should accompany the version
of KCL that is retrieved with KCL and needs to be sent to Japan signed by 
whoever uses KCL. (Bill Schelter also made this remark in his note)

Under that license kcl must be delivered to all users AS IS and NOT merged
with AKCL or any other software.  Only an end user may merge and compile 
AKCL into KCL.  That was part of the original agrement that put KCL on 
the net.  Furthermore you should remember that KCL is NOT a public domain 
code.  It is licensed but free and licenses MUST be sent to the original
developers of KCL (to be strict -- BEFORE copying over the net).  From 
this point of view, the community at large cannot take over its design 
and maintenance. 

AKCL on the other hand is pure public domain code and the two tiered 
distribution that AKCL supports is consistant with this division.

Even though there may be differences of opinion about intellectual 
property rights in the software community, the responsible advocates 
of freely available software do not advocate theft, but use of the existing
system ( copyrights ... ) to guarentee that their objectives are respected.

We are all indebted to these "public" contributions.  Please be careful 
to respect the intensions of each of these authors or everyone will lose.  

Richard Weyhrauch
President 
IBUKI


PS: IBUKI is a company that licenses IBUKI Common Lisp, a commercial product
which is a fully supported and considerably enhanced version of KCL.  It is 
validated by IBUKI to run on over 40 different computers (including all suns,
apollos, hps, dec, ibmaix (370, ps2, 6000), data general, mips, sgi, 88000s
and more) and is relatively inexpensive when compared to other commercial 
Common Lisps.  IBUKI Common Lisp already supports add ons that implement 
most of the CLTL2 changes (CLOS (with compiler support, loop, condition 
handling).  If you are interested in commercial information please contact 
bob@ibuki.com.  We are able to sell a derived work based on KCL because of a 
special licensing arrangement between IBUKI and the two original developers 
of KCL.