Poll: Which Lisp implementations do you use?

[sburson]

can't they just rip out libreadline (or replace it with libedit or something) and then do what they like with the license? That is, of course, if they want to change the license.

It's true. Maybe they've done that; I haven't checked. But if they have, and if they want CLISP to be usable in commercial products, I think they should just switch to the LGPL and eliminate the confusion.

[findinglisp]

I share your concerns about the CLISP license situation. The thing that would particularly worry me is that the reason CLISP is under the GPL is because it uses GNU readline. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLISP, and follow reference 1.) Because of this, it's not clear to me that Haible even has the right to modify the terms of the GPL.

Well if that's the case, can't they just rip out libreadline (or replace it with libedit or something) and then do what they like with the license? That is, of course, if they want to change the license.

Not necessarily, because they might not have full copyright over the whole of CLISP anymore. If they have taken GPL contributions from outside contributors, that makes things sticky. Technically, they'd have to have agreement from each of those contributors. I don't know how many of those they have or whether its feasible to contact all of them. This is essentially the same issue that the Linux kernel has.

If they were clean and got copyright assignment from every contributor, they can do as you say and change the license without issue. Most open source projects aren't that clean.

[TheGZeus]

can't they just rip out libreadline (or replace it with libedit or something) and then do what they like with the license? That is, of course, if they want to change the license.

It's true. Maybe they've done that; I haven't checked. But if they have, and if they want CLISP to be usable in commercial products, I think they should just switch to the LGPL and eliminate the confusion.

Just thought I'd note: Red Hat and SuSE Linux are commercial products.
Slightly snarky to state the obvious, but misnomyrs get started small.

[Wodin]

Well if that's the case, can't they just rip out libreadline (or replace it with libedit or something) and then do what they like with the license? That is, of course, if they want to change the license.

Not necessarily, because they might not have full copyright over the whole of CLISP anymore. If they have taken GPL contributions from outside contributors, that makes things sticky. Technically, they'd have to have agreement from each of those contributors. I don't know how many of those they have or whether its feasible to contact all of them. This is essentially the same issue that the Linux kernel has.

I have heard the argument that Linus could in fact change the license of the Linux kernel without necessarily contacting every single developer who has ever contributed code to the kernel. I can't remember where I read that article, though. As far as I remember the author said something like Linus would have to announce the intention to change the license and then give copyright holders the chance to object. For the ones that object, obviously the code would have to be ripped out and rewritten. For ones that just never responded, you could act as if they had said yes.

I am not a lawyer, though, so I'm not sure how true that is.

[Wodin]

Just thought I'd note: Red Hat and SuSE Linux are commercial products.
Slightly snarky to state the obvious, but misnomyrs get started small.

Yes, I suppose "proprietary" would be a better word to use.

[stephane perrot]

I use mainly Lispworks (Professional) on linux (I use the IDE, I like to be able to extend
the editor in common lisp)

I used to use clisp, that I find complete and interesting (on linux too)

[findinglisp]

I have heard the argument that Linus could in fact change the license of the Linux kernel without necessarily contacting every single developer who has ever contributed code to the kernel. I can't remember where I read that article, though. As far as I remember the author said something like Linus would have to announce the intention to change the license and then give copyright holders the chance to object. For the ones that object, obviously the code would have to be ripped out and rewritten. For ones that just never responded, you could act as if they had said yes.

I am not a lawyer, though, so I'm not sure how true that is.

Hmmm... I would definitely want to talk with a lawyer about that. There may be standard procedures for some of that, but everything I have read about copyright law says that it's a really big PITA to clear copyright when you have lots of people involved. And even a small copyright holder can throw a wrench in the gears.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. Very highly recommended. It goes through all the problems with copyright law. The Creative Commons was created by Lessig to help deal with some of the problems he sees in the laws. Ideally, we'd change the laws, but as the book lays out, there are powerful industries that don't want to see that happen (the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, etc.). To be honest, I don't blame them. When your whole company is based on the original copyright to Mickey Mouse, you would not be doing your fiduciary duty to your shareholders if you let that unravel. That said, the current laws are pretty much unworkable. Everything these days is automatically copyrighted for the lifetime of the author plus something like 75 years. That means that essentially every created work is off limits "forever" unless the author explicitly says otherwise. Consequently, there are a lot of works that are not currently being used that could be reused, reissued, reprinted, etc., but the author can't be found to give permission to do so. Lessig makes the point that in the culture by its nature builds on top of culture and if we make all this raw material "off limits," the culture of the future will be very sterile, without any continuity, because it will have to be created afresh each time with few inputs from the past.

Anyway, I didn't mean to go sideways in this thread. If you're interested in copyright and these issues, check out the book.

[tlareywi]

I guess it's worth noting that the reason I use SBCL is that as for a relative newcomer to Lisp it is more accessible than many other implementations. I think many folks like a nice syntax highlighted IDE to work in. It didn't take me long to find the Eclipse/CUSP combination and CUSP uses SBCL by default (with SLIME). This made it easier to get productive quickly. I know, Eclipse is a lumbering giant but it's intuitive for those not steeped in Emacs. The last thing I wanted to stack on top of learning a new language was learning a new editing strategy.

[qbg]

I just tried out ClozureCL on Linux-x86 (from trunk), and I like it so far. Compiler is fast, the code produced in reasonably fast, smaller initial image than SBCL. After loading McCLIM and the demos, ROOM showed it was using only ~28 megs (while SBCL would use ~56 megs).

The output from some of its functions/macros seem a bit busy to me, and trying the Logic Cube demo from McCLIM causes it to quit, but otherwise nice.

Really late edit: I said the compiler is fast; now it seems to be even faster under 32bit linux; I'm scared how fast it compiles McCLIM and all of its dependencies...

[anta40]

Since I'm still using Windows (beside Linux), then my choice is GNU CLISP.