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lelanthranHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

> I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong …

> I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong anti-commercial comments about LispWorks and Franz. What? I found it informative - clear and to the point about what frustrations you can expect with the licenses. I mean, FCOL, he even made the effort to search google for the cost of the licenses because Franz hides them. What exactly in the following texts do you describe as "strong anti-commercial comments"? ------------------------------------------------------ > Moving to proprietary implementations; Lispworks has been around for more than 30 years and the company producing it still release new versions on a regular basis. > While Lispworks supports most features you would expect from a commercial product (native compiler, multithreading, FFI, GUI library, various graphical tools, a Prolog implementation…), it is hampered by its licensing system. > The free “Personal Edition” limits the program size and the amount of time it can run, making it pretty much useless for anything but evaluation. …

Original discussionCommon Lisp Implementations in 2023186 source comments · at import
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mark_l_watsonHN

I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong anti-commercial comments about LispWorks and Franz. I had a business idea requiring Common Lisp a few years ago and I purchased a LispWorks Professional license. Small standalone executables with a tree shaker [1] and I has received very good support without paying for the high priority support service. I also paid the maintenance fee last year for continued updates. Coincidentally, I am an advisor and chief architect for a small AI company and they use LispWorks also. Many years ago, I worked as a consultant on a medical AI project and my customer paid a fair amount of money to Franz for software licensing and tech support that included helping with development. Incredibly useful! I also love open source Common Lisp and Scheme implementations. Anyway, I would respectfully suggest to the author …

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varjagHN

> It will have to be bought with “incident packs” costing thousands of euros; because yes, paying for a product and a maintenance contract does not mean they will fix bugs, and you will have to pay for each of them. This is something the author made up on the spot. They will most definitely fix the bugs regardless if you have support contract.

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galaxyLogicHN

I don't think the licensing model is wrong but I think it is stupid, because it keeps new customers away. There should be a way to charge for the produced value. If many users are using the produced programs, charge for that. For instance keep the basic development environment reasonably priced but charge for the ability to create executables. My favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment) at the moment is WebStorm by JetBrains. It is about $60 (?) for personal license with updates per year. I can develop JavaScript programs and run them on any JS platform. It is a nice product which truly adds to my productivity. And I can afford it. And I read that JetBrains is doing financially great.

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