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Comment by uniclaude | Hacker News Reader

Your points are all good, but you seem to fail to understand the reason why gp posted this comment. When seeing the Open prefix in the name of some software or platform, people usually except free things, because they've been used to it.

Calling LispWorks stupid might not have been the brightest move around, but the concern was somehow valid.

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Of course I might fail to understand the reason :)

First - OM is licensed under GPL (see their website). While the word "open" in the context of GPL can be discutable depending on the view of the gp, that's not a fault of LispWorks.

Second - if not the GPL has been the confusion in the gp, then - to run AND develop for OM no one needs a commercial license of LispWorks (the runtime/compiler/lister/editor are distributed with OM). A professional tool like LispWorks is needed only to recompile OM itself, which is so or so not a hurdle for the gp until he doesn't gain enough knowledge about and experience with OM AND Common Lisp. By the time he gets there, I'm sure - he will either decide that neither OM or Lisp are his things and then again the license is irrelevant - or he will decide to pursue that path in which case the costs for LW are a bargain in comparison to the value one gets. If not OM, but Lisp seems to be something for him at the end - even then he can choose from about a dozen different implementations with different licensing terms from GPL though Open Source up to licenses for tens of tausends per CPU per year.

Third - "open" can be a bit ladden with "free", but it can mean also an "open architecture" or a "development of software open to the public" or whatever. Again - not reading what is written on the website of the OM creators doesn't do good to the gp.

Last - if you or gp mean that one has to bite in every carrot with an engraved "free" on it is serious then... :)

But I started with the idea to help the gp to look deeper before using strong language and less to continue bashing on soft reasoning.

Peace and regards

The current version is free in several senses, though not all at the same time. The sources to OpenMusic itself are libre (GPL), and the OpenMusic binaries made available for download are gratis (they are self-contained and don't require your own copy of LispWorks). But you do need a copy of LispWorks to build your own binaries. It's free software, but depends on a proprietary compiler.

I believe the main LispWorks dependency is on the GUI toolkit. There have been some porting efforts to SBCL/GTK in the past, but afaik none have been completed.

To summarise: I can download and use OpenMusic the source code of which is issued under the GPL. But to exercise my free software style rights to hack on OpenMusic and recompile the changed software I need to buy a licence for a closed commercial product.

Have I got that right?

Depends entirely on what kind of hacking you want to do. If you want to pull out parts that are portable Common Lisp and use those, you're free to do so. If you want to hack the code so the whole thing compiles on SBCL, you're free to do that too. Similar situation to free-software apps whose developer targets OSX: no legal barrier to using the code on Linux, but may take some work.

'Open' once used to mean something else. Example 'Open VMS' from DEC. It was not open source, but developed to support 'open' standards, etc.

See also 'OpenWindows' from Sun, 'Open Genera' from Symbolics, X/Open, Open Software Foundation, ...

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