A burning issue

["J. Scott Penberthy" <JSP@ibm.com>]

    Date: Mon, 12 Sep 88 16:18 PDT
    From: Reza Seddigh <Seddigh%vermithrax.sch.symbolics.com%RELAY.CS.NET@yktvmh.watson.ibm.com>

         Date: Mon, 12 Sep 88 17:20 EDT
         From: Brad Miller <miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>

         Here's what I consider a burning customer issue, (though from one man's
         perspective...)

         Customers should be allowed to send patches to symbolics code back and forth
         to each-other DIRECTLY. This is particularly the case if site A fixes some
         problem Q, and cannot send a patch to site B with same problem because it
         violates the source licence.

         In general, it should be permissable for sites to swap source versions if
         they both have source licences for the same release.

     Thank you. While I investigate this issue, I invite other members of the
     list (Symbolics and otherwise) to comment.

I agree.  Symbolics has their hands full just trying to cope with all
the bug reports; it often takes several weeks to obtain a patch.

Here's one proposal that might work.  Let's suppose that Symbolics
established a new mailing list called "lispm-patches."  They could
assign someone in their software support group the task of looking over
this mailing list, ensuring that no "trade secrets" were being released
by the patches.  The person in software support could then place a
Symbolics blessing (some sort of envelope disclaimer) on all cleared
messages before forwarding them out to the 1lispm-patches0 subscribers.

While not all patches would be worth including in future releases (every
company has their own software methodologies, Symbolics included), some
patches might indeed help Symbolics to better cope with the flow of bug
reports and user requests.  Users of the list could also help this
process by providing "sufficient" documentation for each patch submitted
to 1lispm-patches0.

What do other people think?

Scott