Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!crdgw1!daredevil!vita From: vita@daredevil.crd.ge.com (Mark F. Vita) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Allegro Common Lisp licensing fees Message-ID: <2034@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Date: 31 Aug 89 17:57:11 GMT References: <4872@merlin.usc.edu> <939@mrsvr.UUCP> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP (Mark F. Vita) Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY Lines: 67 In article alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) writes: >When Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp was sold by Coral (i.e. before >Apple purchased it), the licensing fees were much higher. The >cost was between $30 and $60 for every copy of your application which >you sold or gave away. OK, so Coral's policy was worse than Apple's. Great. But Apple's policy still sucks. The fact that Coral had an even worse policy doesn't justify anything. > When Apple purchased the Lisp, they lowered >the price, bundled in some tools which Coral had sold as add-ons, and >lowered the licensing cost to a annual fee. Well, if the fee is so , why not just get rid of it? It's probably not worth the bureaucracy it generates. Also, that $100 means a lot more to me (small, poor independent developer), than it does to Apple (rich, $5 billion dollar corporation). >As a point of reference, most other Common Lisp vendors (Sun, Lucid, >Gold Hill), charge a per-copy fee for run-time licences. Apple has Why are you creating an (artificial) distinction for Lisp products? Why should a Lisp compiler require licensing fees, but not a C compiler? Symantec does a very good business with their C and Pascal compilers, and they don't find it necessary to impose licensing fees. >one of the lowest costs in the business, if not the lowest. They >mostly just want acknowledgment OK, so if they really just want acknowledgement, why not adopt a policy something like Symantec's; i.e. require that the message "This product was produced with Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp" appear in the About box or something. I don't see how me writing them a check for $100 "acknowledges" anything. >Disclaimer: I used to work for Coral, now I work for Apple, I wish >everything was free and no one had to earn a living, and my opinions >are my own, not my companies. I don't think anyone's arguing that Apple should give everything away for free. I think Apple is entitled to recover their costs on their development products. But royalty fees on compilers are absolutely inexcusable. I mean, I've already paid for the product once; why should I have to pay again in order to use it for its intended purpose? Another one of my pet peeves: MacApp. Apple is touting this as the "next-generation" way of doing Mac development, making the Mac much easier to develop for. Apple should be encouraging everyone to adopt this swell new technology, right? Wrong; instead they charge a $100/yr royalty fee for developing with MacApp. Why? I don't have to pay $100/yr to make Toolbox calls. Why should I have to pay $100/yr to use MacApp? I'm amazed that Apple can't seem to figure out what a brain-damaged policy this is. Apple should not be running their development services as a profit center. It's quite apparent that they are doing just that (the recent price hikes at APDA, on MPW, etc.) Apple should be creating incentive for people to develop for the Mac, not disincentive. While these greedy policies may make more money for them in the short run, it will probably hurt them in long run. ---- Mark Vita vita@crd.ge.com General Electric CRD ..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita Schenectady, NY