🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ALMS.89Aug30161450@brazil.cambridge.apple.com> alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) writes:
>When Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp was sold by Coral (i.e. before
>Apple purchased it), the licensing fees were much higher.  The
>cost was between $30 and $60 for every copy of your application which
>you sold or gave away. 

OK, so Coral's policy was worse than Apple's.  Great.  But Apple's
policy still sucks.  The fact that Coral had an even worse policy
doesn't justify anything.

> When Apple purchased the Lisp, they lowered
>the price, bundled in some tools which Coral had sold as add-ons, and
>lowered the licensing cost to a <largely symbolic> annual fee.

Well, if the fee is so <largely symbolic>, why not just get rid of it?
It's probably not worth the bureaucracy it generates.  Also, that $100
means a lot more to me (small, poor independent developer), than it
does to Apple (rich, $5 billion dollar corporation).

>As a point of reference, most other Common Lisp vendors (Sun, Lucid,
>Gold Hill), charge a per-copy fee for run-time licences.  Apple has

Why are you creating an (artificial) distinction for Lisp products?
Why should a Lisp compiler require licensing fees, but not a C
compiler?  Symantec does a very good business with their C and Pascal
compilers, and they don't find it necessary to impose licensing fees.

>one of the lowest costs in the business, if not the lowest.  They
>mostly just want acknowledgment

OK, so if they really just want acknowledgement, why not adopt a
policy something like Symantec's; i.e. require that the message "This
product was produced with Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp" appear in the
About box or something.  I don't see how me writing them a check for
$100 "acknowledges" anything.

>Disclaimer:  I used to work for Coral, now I work for Apple, I wish
>everything was free and no one had to earn a living, and my opinions
>are my own, not my companies.

I don't think anyone's arguing that Apple should give everything away
for free.  I think Apple is entitled to recover their costs on their
development products.  But royalty fees on compilers are absolutely
inexcusable.  I mean, I've already paid for the product once; why
should I have to pay again in order to use it for its intended
purpose?

Another one of my pet peeves: MacApp.  Apple is touting this as the
"next-generation" way of doing Mac development, making the Mac much
easier to develop for.  Apple should be encouraging everyone to adopt
this swell new technology, right?  Wrong; instead they charge a
$100/yr royalty fee for developing with MacApp.  Why?  I don't have to
pay $100/yr to make Toolbox calls.  Why should I have to pay $100/yr
to use MacApp?  I'm amazed that Apple can't seem to figure out what a
brain-damaged policy this is.

Apple should not be running their development services as a profit
center.  It's quite apparent that they are doing just that (the recent
price hikes at APDA, on MPW, etc.)  Apple should be creating incentive
for people to develop for the Mac, not disincentive.  While these
greedy policies may make more money for them in the short run, it will
probably hurt them in long run.

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Mark Vita                              vita@crd.ge.com
General Electric CRD               	..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita
Schenectady, NY