[LispM-Hackers] Latex

Tue Apr 23 18:53:01 2002

John Morrison wrote:

> Hi;
>
> > I was half joking, more reflecting on your earlier comments about keeping
> > things discreet with TI for a while and not existing anybody unnecessarily.
>
> I wish we knew who to talk to about this.  Now that we've got many more
> people on the list, maybe it's time to ask the question Yet Again.  Does
> anybody have any ideas?  Please?
>
> > I personally fail to see why TI would ever have bad feelings towards the
> > project. But I am not TI...
>
> No, and I don't even know to whom they sold the business.  Does anybody
> on the list know?  How would we best go about this?  I am eager to start
> following the thread if somebody can at least point me in the right direction.

The first step is to find out whether TI or HP now owns the rights to the Explorer.
The reason this is unclear is that TI sold the division that produced the Explorer,
DSG, to HP, including the Explorer's sister machine the 1500 (Unix), so some
people assume that the Explorer went too.  But I think the Explorer was already
discontinued by the time of that sale, so maybe it wasn't part of the deal, although
HP did pick up DSG's service business, incl. servicing Explorers.  No one I've
every asked actually knew the answer to this, but I never tried very hard.  I could
try harder.

Once we know this, its just a matter of negotiating a license.  It would help if
there was a champion inside the company, since what we are wanting is
essentially an Open Source License, I would think, and there's not much motivation
for a company to do that unless there's someone inside pushing it, or maybe for the
publicity.  After all, they're going to have to pay their lawyers to deal with this.

Steve

> I have tried at least twice to track down via MIT the original CADR
> stuff.  Daniel (Hi!) -- or at least I *THINK* it was Daniel -- helped me
> track down some of the original CONS/CADR software off an ITS dump tape,
> but it seemed woefully incomplete (although I could be mistaken).  I
> also remember talking to somebody (Alan Bawden?) at the AI Lab a few
> years ago who said he had no problem with letting us have the software
> (which I'm sure Steve and Paul can tie, ancestrally, anyways, directly
> to the TI stuff we've got, as the comments attest), but that they
> couldn't find it all (isn't this a shame?), and that no bootable load
> band had ever been backed up (which would certainly complicates
> bootstrapping an emulator).

> When there was hope that enough of the MacLisp-based bootstrapping stuff
> (cross-developed from ITS, or so I recall) could be obtained to
> rebootstrap the process, I had even gone so far as to track down an
> ancient UNIX (early BSD) version of Franz Lisp to try and port the stuff
> to.  Alas, the sources seemed to me to be too incomplete for this to
> work.
>
> Lately, over the past few months, I have been trying to get MIT's
> Technology Licensing Office to help me figure out what could be done,
> but while the person I've been talking to has been extremely nice and
> has tried (apparently) extremely hard to get to the bottom of the status
> of the MIT-vintage software, she hasn't been able to give me any answer
> at all, much less a definitive one.  Maybe I should pester her again (I
> feel bad, because even though as I said she's been really nice, I get
> the feeling she views this as a hopeless, sort of annoying crank request
> for some 25-year-old software nobody cares about anymore.  I, for my
> part, have tried to be as nice as possible, too, because I'd REALLY like
> an answer, and I'd like for it to be an answer I'd be happy with.)

> I also found an ancient Usenet posting from a dp@world.std.com (try
> google) that somebody's brother had taken a CADR home.  I got neither
> reply nor a bounce from my message to him.  If anybody on the list (Hi,
> William) had a bootable LMI box, that would certainly be interesting.
>
> -jm
>
> --
> ==== John Morrison
> ==== MAK Technologies Inc.
> ==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
> ==== http://www.mak.com/
> ==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
> ==== fax:617-876-9208
> ==== jm@mak.com
>
> http://lists.unlambda.com/mailman/listinfo/lispm-hackers

--
Steve Ford
Object Services and Consulting, Inc.
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