🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DAVEG.91Jul3025308@torment.cs.caltech.edu> daveg@torment.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes:
>Barry Margolin said:
>> If I had the source code, I wouldn't be stuck waiting for company X to get
>> around to implementing my request.  [...]
>If company X gave you source at little or no extra charge, but in
>exchange for a strict non-disclosure agreement, you could do all the
>things you describe.  You could also share your changes with other X
>customers who have signed the agreement.

That's true.  And, in fact, much of my day-to-day work is with Symbolics
workstations, and that is how they distribute their source code (they
bundle much of it with the system, and charge a nominal fee for the
remainder).

Perhaps one of the reasons Symbolics can afford to do this is that much of
their software isn't portable.  It would be almost as much effort to port
it to another architecture as it would be to reimplement it from the
documentation (several vendors of Lisps for conventional systems copied
some of Symbolics's Lisp extensions, such as processes, flavors, and
resources, mostly based on the documented interfaces).

-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar