On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Sam Steingold sds@gnu.org wrote:
I think Franz, Lispworks, ITA et al are vital parts of the "lisp community". I think the fact that none of them is paying anyone to maintain SLIME, ALU wiki, common-lisp.net &c is indicative of understandable but deplorable corporate myopia ("public goods cannot be produced by private businesses").
All of those you mentioned have supported the CL community in various ways, with money as well as with other resources. This includes things like being a sponsor of the ALU (and thus at least indirectly paying for the ALU website), sponsoring Lisp meetings and conferences, helping open source projects with licenses and/or manpower, and other things. It went even as far as Martin Simmons from LispWorks working on SLIME himself although the company he is a director of sells its own IDE.
Edi.