Re: CLIM 2.0

[Scott_Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

Bob,

Thanks for your note.  I am glad to hear that a group of you are trying to
resolve the remaining problems in the CLIM 2.0 spec.  From our point of
view, having a single, well-defined standard at the level of CLIM is much
more important to the Lisp world than the details of what the spec
contains.  I think that the Lisp world as a whole needs a standardized user
interface toolkit in order to hold our ground against C.

Our particular concern is how to make CLIM available to the growing
community of CMU Common Lisp users.  As you probably know, our system is
free and in the public domain.  A lot of our users are university people,
or people doing Lisp "bootleg" projects within C-oriented companies, so
they are very sensitive to the price of things.  If CLIM is unavailable to
these people, or is available only at a very high cost, then this part of
the user community will certainly turn to some other standard (maybe
Lispview, maybe CLM/Gina, maybe something else), and we will do what we can
to support with some good alternative.  Even though this group of
users may not be large in terms of the total Lisp market, such a split
could considerably muddle the status of CLIM as a de facto standard.  On
the other hand, if users of free Common Lisps can also get CLIM free (or
very cheap), and without a lot of licensing hassles, and if the vendors can
settle their differences, then I think CLIM is a lock.

Ideally, if we distribute CLIM as part of CMU CL, we would like to
distribute the source code for that version as well (as we do, for example,
with PCL).  I don't know if this is what you had in mind by "the right to
do anything" with the code.  Perhaps we can come up with some sort of
copyright that would give blanket permission for users of CMU CL and its
*free* derivatives to run the code, but that would prohibit other vendors
from including the code in commercial products unless they make a separate
deal with the companies involved.

So, yes, we would very much like to help make CLIM 2.0 a widely accepted
standard, and we would like to take a look at the proposed code-sharing
agreement to see if it is the right way for us to go, given our overall
goals as stated above.

Regards,
Scott

===========================================================================
Scott E. Fahlman
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Internet: sef+@cs.cmu.edu