[Openmcl-devel] CLIM2 on CCL

[Gary Byers]

On 07/26/2016 02:25 AM, Chris Hanson wrote:
> On Jul 25, 2016, at 9:42 AM, Rainer Joswig <joswig at lisp.de
> <mailto:joswig at lisp.de>> wrote:
>>
>> One could get the sources for the MCL variant CLIM 2 from Digitool. It
>> did cost extra.
>> From what I remember, this version is owned by Alice Hartley. The MCL
>> version of CLIM 2
>> hasn't been ported to CCL, at least I know no version of it.
>
> Was it not part of the MCL release as Open Source?
>
> Was Alice the final owner of Digitool, Inc. and its assets? Has anyone
> spoken to her recently?

I spoke to her a few weeks ago.

She said that she had given the MCL sources she had to Gail; Clozure had 
used them as the basis of a project called "MCL-in-CCL", which was an 
attempt to port the MCL UI code to (among other things) Intel Macs.

For a variety of reasons (few of which were purely technical), that 
project spun out of control.  The Rosetta-based MCL that was opensourced
was not part of the original plan, but was another way of achieving the
same goal: getting old MCL code running on Intel hardware.

This was in 2010, Not too long after, Apple dropped support for Rosetta
and (perhaps a bit later) deprecated much of the Carbon framework, which 
MCL-in-CCL had tried to target.


>
> I’ve actually looked around to try to find out who owns the Digitool
> intellectual property, with the goal of getting earlier releases of MCL
> distributable (as well as any sources for them that may still exist),
> but I haven’t been able to find much.
>
> Heck, even the pre-5.2 source repository for MCL is lost now, unless

I think that I've explained this before,but it doesn't seem to be 
sinking in,

The MCL source repository was "some folders on Alice's disk", and had 
been since 1997 (when Bill and I left).  Alice had a dial-up internet 
connection, and if she didn't need to use the internet to use a vcs
collaboratively she did not keep things under version control. we used
what she sent to Gail in MCL-in-CCL and that was kept in svn, as was 
RMCL.  Clozure may still have the svn repos for those projects 
somewwhere; rme might know if/where they are.  If I had local copies,
I lost those copies in a fire in early 2015.

If MCL had any commercial value, no one who worked for Digitool saw any
evidence of that.  I eventually traded claim to the money that Digitool 
owed me for the right to opensource what became known as OpenMCL /ClozureCL.

When people talk about what a loss the loss of MCL sources is ... I'm 
peersonally impacted much more by the loss of other things that I lost
in the fire than I am by the loss of MCL, but it's (long past) time to 
move on.  I doubt if there are interesting MCL sources out there waiting 
to be discovered; I'd personally like to see MCL 1,0 sources
someday (to see if some of the brutal hacks that I remember were as 
brutal as I think they were) but I've long since given up on that.

It is (long past) time to move on.  Please do so.

> someone can engage with Google to recover it, or unless someone managed
> to grab it using git-svn before Google Code closed down. (Since the svn
> repo wasn’t converted to hg, but kept in place as a new hg repository
> was created for 5.2+, only the hg repo is downloadable from the Google
> Code Archive site. Better than nothing, especially since it still has
> the Fred code, but I was hoping for history too…)
>
>   -- Chris
>
>
>
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