[racket] Clarification on licensing of Racket code?...

hello, Mr. Asche!  Please, don't be so harsh.

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 6:40 AM, Rüdiger Asche <rac at ruediger-asche.de> wrote:
> This just reaffirms my former conviction that nothing is really free, and
> I'd much rather spend my money on a good commercial product (and therebye
> support the people who deserve to have their development efforts paid as
> well as be entitled to professional product support*) than on a plethora of
> lawyers to clarify whether something dubbed as "free" really *is* free

it is so much free that it denies you the chance to make it non-free. :)

seemingly, the likes of Facebook, Amazon and others don't share your
objections to open source software.  But, then again, their "apps" are
not really deployed on the client...


> So if anyone has pointers to commercial variations of Racket or Scheme to be
> used as building and deployment platforms for my commercial software (Chez
> Scheme seems to have ceased out of existence; I downloaded the trial version
> and found that it doesn't run on XP anymore and therefore most probably not
> on later versions of Windows), I'd be glad to hear about them. In the
> meantime, I'll probably stick to what I'm doing right now - use Racket for
> prototyping, testing, internal utilties etc. and code the production level
> software in plain ol' C/C++. Bummer because I know by now that coding in
> Scheme/Racket WILL produce sturdier, smaller and generally better software
> even in the field, but apparently there world ain't ready for it yet.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> *Don't get me wrong - the support on this mailing list is exceptionally
> good, but it's all voluntary, and in a commercial environment, it is sort of
> dangerous to rely on voluntary support no matter how good the quality.

I'm sure all of the racket devs would appreciate your financial
support, even though most of them are academics and researchers who
grew scheme way beyond its pure usage as a learning and research tool.

Here's one thought, though:  if you need support with commercial
software, you can yell your problem at a phone and wait for a
solution, either the operator reading you a FAQ entry about what
you're doing wrong or a patch to a perfectly legitimate bug in the
software.  Provided the company doesn't go out of business (can you
spell CLIPPER?), you should be able to get going.  With open-source
software, though, you have the sources!  No longer you'll have to rely
on an outdated copy of CLIPPER running on a DOS emulator:  you
yourself can patch its bugs, port it to newer systems etc.  Or, if you
don't have time or technical skills to do it, you can still hire
someone who can.  You won't be alone in that goal:  many other people
who invested in the software will help.  An added side-effect benefit
of open-source:  maintenance chores are shared too.

sad to know about chez... if only it was open-source...