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Comment by pdw | Hacker News Reader

Don't hold your breath, these rumors have been going for well over a decade:

2018: "The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330

2014: "The problem is that the Symbolics IP is now owned by John Mallery; he has stated he has plans for making it available but so far (several years) has not yet done so." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034

The software itself can easily be found these days, if you're interested for hobbyist reasons.

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Yeah, and I wouldn’t give Mallery a single cent for any of it unless he can demonstrate that Andrew Topping actually paid the executors of the Symbolics bankruptcy for it; if not, it shouldn’t have been a part of Topping’s estate.

I absolutely do not understand why Mallery is just sitting on it instead of making it available to everyone. It has zero non-historical value. Just put it out into the world and let it be examined as the historical artifact it is.

(That was my plan when I learned of Topping’s death. Unfortunately, Mallery beat me to acquiring it, and then just planted his ass on it.)

> (That was my plan when I learned of Topping’s death. Unfortunately, Mallery beat me to acquiring it, and then just planted his ass on it.)

That reads as someone who sees it as a purely commercial investment, and is waiting for it to mature.

If his plan was to sit on an asset hoping it would appreciate, he would have been better off buying wine, cars, baseball cards, or even beanie babies.

The potential value of an investment is in the eye of each investor. You believe beanie babies are a better investment, but Mallet might not agree with you.

Fortunately, the market will get to decide which one of us is correct. I'd place my bet on almost anything other than an obsolete operating system.

You're a mallet

This is more than a rumor: Gary Palter is one of the last employees of Symbolics who wrote the emulator in the first place, and he communicated with the owner.

He co-authored this article about the development of the emulator: http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html

The fact that he still has hope is significant.

Is he the copyright holder? Being the last employee doesn't have anything to do with copyright, if you're an employee of a company.

The company (Symbolics) was owned by Andrew Topping. Topping died, and Symbolics' IP was sold at his deceased estate auction. It was bought by John C. Mallery, a (former?) MIT professor, so he is the current copyright holder. (Or at least he asserts he is–some have expressed doubts over the legitimacy of the transaction, but the only way to get a definitive answer to that would be through a lawsuit, and nobody thus far has wanted to go down that path–the risks are that one might spend a fortune on lawyers and Mallery could win.)

Gary Palter was one of the last employees, and as such doesn't own the copyrights. However, he is in personal contact with Mallery, and the enhancements he has made to Genera (such as porting it to ARM) have been done with Mallery's permission.

Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Palter has never clearly explained it, although I imagine he doesn't want to burn his bridges with Mallery, and that may limit what he's able to publicly say.

> Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available.

Clearly he's hoping John Titor shows up and offers to exchange priceless insights about the future in exchange for access to the code in order to repair some weird embedded system in the far future. :)

More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected. They liked them enough to collect them, after all. People seeking them out might help cement the inflated valuation.

The sad thing is that when people die the people that inherit the assets often see no value in them at all and lose or discard them.

> More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected.

Does anyone know how much Mallery paid at the auction? It makes a big difference whether it was $50 or $50,000

If he paid a significant sum for it, he may still be clinging to hopes of an eventual return on his investment.

Rumor is he presented an unpaid invoice for on the order of $10K to Topping’s estate and got the IP that way. If it’d actually gone to auction I was l prepared to pay quite a bit more.

The answer is obviously “money”. An MIT researcher’s legacy will be that he withheld a huge piece of computing history from the world for personal gain. What a stain.

What money? In what alternate universe is a well-heeled investor or commercial entity going to pay a bunch of money for an ancient single-user operating system written in and for a language that, let's be honest, almost nobody uses?

There is enough money sloshing around in tech that it is plausible someone or some company would buy it for a lot more than Mallery paid for it. It was probably bought for, at most, a few thousand US$, on a lark. It's a lottery ticket.

Why would there be a stipulation for non-commercial use if this isn’t about money?

Maybe the owner thinks Genera will become more valuable in the future? My point is I don't see any possibility of that actually happening. I'd imagine there is some revenue for maintenance/bug fixes of existing installations (David Schmidt has apparently been running the hardware maintenance/support side of things for quite some time,) but I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year.

> I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year

That’s the worst part of all this. It’s not like he’s sitting on a goldmine, he’s hoarding something of immense historical value because it’s slightly more beneficial for him to do so than it would be to share it.

I can’t imagine steering your legacy from being immortalized as an MIT AI researcher to… that.

Mallery looks like somebody in their 70ies, i guess we'll have to wait for the next deceased estate auction?

I know it's not pretty, but it's an option.

> The software itself can easily be found these days

where?

Good article on getting things set up: https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html

An old, messy automation: https://github.com/ynniv/vagrant-opengenera

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