[franz!fisi!fkunze: common lisp technical committee membership]

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

I thought that the Franz people had finally given up, but apparently not.
I have sent Kunze a preliminary answer, which I will forward to the rest
of you, and will answer him more fully over the weekend.  As we
discussed, I'll point out that a committee with representation from
every company is infeasible, and will also mention the plans to make a
list of "participating" companies (with technical committee members not
stressing their company affiliations).

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Date: Monday, 7 April 1986  13:32-EST
From: franz!fisi!fkunze at kim.berkeley.edu (Fritz Kunze)
To:   at su-ai.arpa:FAHLMAN@C.CS.CMU.EDU, ucbkim!USC-ISIF.ARPA!MATHIS,             ucbvax!squires@usc-isi.arpa
Re:   common lisp steering and technical committee membership

						April 7, 1986
To: Steven Squires
    Scott Fahlman
    Robert Mathis

This letter is a formal response to the recent proposal for
setting up the Common Lisp Steering and Technical committees.

We at Franz Inc. feel that the treatment of commercial 
interests in standardization is a very critical issue.

Franz Inc. currently has 6 announced contracts with computer 
vendors for implementations of Extended Common Lisp.
Other contracts are not yet public, and additional ones
are under negotiation.

Thus we represent a potentially large percentage of the Common Lisp 
community. We are not represented on either the steering or technical 
committees, although we have made every effort to be on them.

We note that Richard Gabriel, president of Lucid Inc, a company 
whose sole product is an implementation of Common Lisp, is to be 
on both the steering and technical committee.  Scott Fahlman's name 
has also appeared as associated with Lucid (e.g. on slides 
presented by Richard Gabriel at a Sun Sales Show).

This has the effect of looking like an endorsement, by DARPA, or
ANSI, of Lucid.  I will be happy to provide you with ample evidence 
where perceived relationships/and or appearances have severely hurt 
us commercially, especially in competition with Lucid. 

We think it is imperative to correct this. We think the membership of
the technical committee should be broadened, and the steering committee
should be narrowed.  The technical committee should include
representatives --essentially all of whom are at finger-tip's distance
by electronic mail-- from all interested parties.  Similarly, the steering
committee should not have any taint of commercial partiality.

While companies which primarily sell hardware or have broadly
diversified products can afford to ignore these details, competing
companies which focus on satisfying the needs of DARPA, DoD, and research
and education communities should be nurtured. We fear the
effect of the committee membership will be to provide
implied exclusive approval of one vendor as an OEM supplier of
Common LISP.

We sincerely hope that a remedy to this situation can be found soon.

Regards,
Fritz Kunze
President, Franz Inc.