5 ms·

Is there still some kind of revenue stream from Symbolics Lisp or does the owner just want it to die with him?

• solarmist 3y ago
  It’s a pain to do the work associated, with no personal upside, so it’s probably neglect more than anything.
  • speed_spread 3y ago
    Pain? The hardest part is probably finding a five inch floppy drive connected to a machine that can push to GitHub. Even that could be outsourced to some trusted resourceful LISP enthusiast.
    • linguae 3y ago
      There's a lot of preparatory and legal work involved in preparing a proprietary software project for release as an open source project. It's not as simple as just pushing the source tree to GitHub and calling it a day. For example, if portions of the code were licensed by other other copyright holders, permission from them is required. There are other cases where the code needs to be examined before release in order to edit or remove materials that are personally identifying, embarrassing, or could cause legal issues if publicly disclosed.
      • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it. Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
        • lispm 3y ago
          > mystique would be lost People would also discover that the architecture is not simple, but grown over a decade while there was rapid development of the basics people take for granted: standards, languages, networking, operating systems, ... In the mid 80s TCP/IP was an expensive add on for Genera. Later it was made a part of the OS. But development stopped before it could add things like IPv6, Unicode, basic security, HTTPS, and other things. One could add it, but then one had to learn ZetaLisp (70s/80s), Flavors (early 80s), Symbolics Common Lisp (80s/90s), an object-oriented networking stack architecture from the 80s, ... You would have a second life in a technology stack somewhere between the past and the future, in a parallel world.
          • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
            It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. Still I also think these kinds of "live editing" environments don't translate well into some modern "best practices" around version control, deployment, versioning, etc. Remembering my experience with LambdaMOO & similar and then later Smalltalk/Squeak and recently with doing stuff with Julia's REPL, etc. They're fascinating and fairly productive, but I am not convinced about this technique's ability to scale.
            • lispm 3y ago
              > It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. It may not have the fancy UI, may not have a fancy user experience, may not be an operating system, may have a more primitive Lisp dialect, may not have a good multi-threading story, ... but it might exist and people put a lot of work into it: GNU Emacs and its extensions. That's how it is...
              • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
                I think half the magic I associate with the Symbolics products is that they also made their own hardware, custom built for Lisp. Which is kinda neat and magical, if entirely impractical. That plus the lovely keyboards, nice case design, etc. etc.
  • BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    Please. Dude could day “hey I want to open source this, someone do the work for me and show me where to sign” and people would trip over themselves rushing to make it happen.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  Yeah, my thoughts precisely. Genera is obsolete. I cannot imagine what possible profit could be made. There may be value in the design that could be of benefit even today, but I cannot understand people who hoard old IP.
  • the-smug-one 3y ago
    My guess is that there are maintenance contracts which can be quite lucrative.
    • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Still? That would surprise me.
      • lallysingh 3y ago
        Someone's in a pickle if they need support. The older the contract, the more it's probably worth.
• nabla9 3y ago
  In 2021 there was port to Apple M1 MacOS, so it seems like there can be small revenue streams still. Open Portable Genrea runs on 64-bit x86 and Arm.
  • lispm 3y ago
    Gary Palter has made it work both on Linux and macOS, both x86-64 and ARM64. He also brought the original Open Genera for DEC Alpha to the same software level.