[Ecls-list] success, was: broken local installation of ecl

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Oliver Kullmann
<O.Kullmann at swansea.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> FreeBSD is an operating system and it includes readline in components,
>> but editline was born indeed in the NetBSD community to avoid the
>> poisoning effect of that license.
>>
>
> But the FreeBSD-people have also a *political agenda*.

As an ECL user, I'm very happy with the current license terms (LGPL).  Although
readline may be useful (OpenAxiom is an interactive program), I do not
really miss it.  I can find alternatives if its absence is a hindrance.

I also appreciate that the only active maintainer ECL has, does not need
to spend the limited time+resources on fruitless discussions on `political
agenda'.  I rather see that energy spent on improving the system so that, say,
when a function definition is missing, the system does not silently disappear
in the void, but rather report a use of undefined function (as do most
other Lisp
implementations).  I would like to see a better compiler.  That takes time.

ECL will certainly become less attractive to me if it has to be GPL.  There is
no shortage of GPL Lisp systems out there.

-- Gaby