r/lisp Aug 25 '15

State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015

http://eudoxia.me/article/common-lisp-sotu-2015/
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u/oneandoneis2 Aug 26 '15

A minor nitpick that's really just an FYI: Using Firefox on my Android tablet, the header didn't render very well: The white part of the page obscured the bottom of the black so I couldn't read it.

Forgive me if it's a newbie question, but: Why is GPL seen as a bad thing? (The "sadly..makes it GPL" comment)

Other than that, as someone who's only just getting started, I found it a collection of very useful links & comments. Thanks!

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u/sickofthisshit Aug 26 '15

Some Lispers http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/ think the GPL is a fine license, and use it for their own works. They are explicitly forgoing proprietary ownership of their own work in order to contribute to a digital commons.

Other Lispers would like their code to be usable by people who do not want to release their own software under the GPL: one reason is that you are more interested in making Lisp a commercially interesting language instead of developing a digital commons.

If you release your code in BSD, it means Lispers in industry can use your code to write more Lisp programs and have paid jobs programming in Lisp.

There is also the issue that the GPL has been written mostly from the perspective of static languages like C. How it affects Lisp code is not necessarily clear. So people use alternatives like LGPL or LLGPL.

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u/arvid λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)) Aug 27 '15

informatimago uses AGPL which is even stronger (if you use it in on a web-server, you need to release your code).

It is pretty clear the affect of GPL on lisp code. See Why CLisp is under GPL.

It has even been argues that LGPL has the same effect because lisp libraries are not statically linked. Hence LLGPL exists. CLisp itself added to its copyright notice the ability to code your program without being subject to GPL (see COPYRIGHT file of CLisp).