[Openmcl-devel] The original CCL

[mikel evins]

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 9:40 PM, Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:
> 
> On Jun 22, 2016, at 10:39 AM, mikel evins <mevins at me.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jun 22, 2016, at 12:33 PM, Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Digitool used some Apple vcs that was
>>> (somehow) accessible over the net
>> 
>> I think that was Projector. I don't know if Apple still uses it. They used to sort of keep everything forever, but they also used to not be very enthusiastic about helping people outside the company get their hands on it.
> 
> Projector was a supported part of Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and even split out into its own separate component that could be interacted with via AppleEvents from an IDE or other environment (SourceServer). So we actually did want people to use it, and plenty did. :)

Right. I'm not saying Apple didn't want people outside the company to use Projector. I'm saying that it has generally had no interest in helping anyone outside the company get their hands on old discontinued software projects like Macintosh Common Lisp. As an example, a couple of times people have asked me whether Apple could be persuaded to release some things that I worked on when I was there. The short, uncomplicated answer to that question is "no".

That shouldn't be particularly surprising. When I was there, Apple's software library had tons of interesting old stuff in it--for example, I found and ran ancient versions of Apple Smalltalk and some wonderful experimental things that had been built with it. But that software was never released to the public and most likely never will be. Most discontinued projects were never packaged for release. It would take significant effort to prepare them for some kind of open-source release. Apple Legal would have to examine them to make sure they were happy with what was being released and how it was being released. Apple management would have to have some reason to think it was worthwhile for all that work to be done on the company's dime. All of that is pretty unlikely in general.

That's what I meant when I said Apple wasn't very enthusiastic about helping people outside the company get their hands on [old discontinued software projects].