[lispm]

yes, building a product to include development tools (compiler, ...) of LispWorks or Allegro CL would be expensive and not really attractive. I think Franz, Inc. has such a licensing agreement for Allegro CL, but their licensing model is different anyway.

In former times there was a market for add-one GUI or IDE tools. Lucid CL made money from licensing their Lisp to other companies, which then resold those with tools added on (like the SUN Common Lisp IDE). The Action! GUI designer was available for MCL. CLIM was an add-on product. The big Expert System development environments were available as add-on products to Lisp systems.

For a commercial customer something like LispWorks or Allegro CL might still be worth it - they are technically very stable platforms.

[mikelevins]

I tried to work out a way to reimplement my old programmable WYSIWIG word-processor, Alpaca, using Lispworks, but we've been unable to reach an agreement that works for me and for Lispworks. They don't want me to make something that someone could use to compete with their product, and I don't want to make a crippled version of Alpaca.

I wrote the original Alpaca in CCL, using its Cocoa interface. I used it to write a book, and a Japanese company approached me about licensing it for a product, but I fell ill before I could do anything more with it. By the time I recovered enough to look at it again, it had bitrotted. The macOS interfaces had changed out from under it.

I imagine I could fix it up and get it going again, but I'd really like to make a version of Alpaca that works on Linux and Windows as well as macOS. The obstacle is that I need a rich-text engine that can do a good job with page layout, and I don't know whether there's a suitable one, or which Lisp (that isn't Lispworks) would be best to use with it. Qt maybe? Perhaps with ECL? I guess I'd rather use CCL or SBCL. Anybody know of a text-and-page-layout engine or collection of libraries that will work well on macOS, Linux, and Windows with CCL or SBCL?