Talk:Symbolics/Archives/2013

Symbolics and RMS
The person who made the last edit stated "I was there." That poses a problem for Wikipedia - see verifiability. Could you point to interviews or other verifiable sources where the claim was made? "Free As In Freedom", RMS's biography, discusses the Symbolics situation, but RMS breaking their stuff doesn't get a mention. --Robert Merkel 06:37, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * It doesn't directly address the questions, but Stallman talks about the MIT/LMI/Symbolics split and his motivations in this interview. --Zippy 06:55, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It would be nice to have some more information and documentation about the Symbolics/Stallman controversy. I know that an employee of Symbolics even claimed that Stallman made a bomb threat against them. This was stated in a published book about the history of Symbolics. Even the Internet Archive's copies of pages about this have been expunged! So perhaps this should be investigated.

I was one of the founders of Symbolics. I wrote EINE, and Zwei with Mike McMahon, and wrote much of the early Lisp machine software including the debugger, timesharing scheduler, CHAOSNET implementation, and so on. Later I was the main designer of the Statice object-oriented database managment system.

RMS has published his side of the story in an actual published book, called "Free Software; Free Society", and has spoken extensively on the topic, whereas there have been relatively few forums in which anyone from Symbolics has had a chance to respond. I'd like to first point out that this all happened a long time ago. Tempers ran very high during this period, and many strong statements were made on both sides, the recounting of which would serve no useful purpose in my view. Secondly, RMS and I have personally reconciled and are on personally good terms again; I understand what he's been doing, I think it has a great deal of validity, and I am extremely impressed by his degree of success.

However, I'd like to respond to a few particular points. First, RMS says (these quotations are from his book) "Symbolics hired nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab, and the depopulated community was unable to maintain itself." At the time Symbolics was founded, there were actually only four and a half hackers hired away from the AI Lab (Knight, Holloway, Cannon, McMahon, and Dave Moon who was only half-time at the AI Lab). Symbolics had a total of 21 technical founders. The rest came from MIT's Laborary for Computer Science and had never been part of the AI Lab community (e.g. Clark Baker), from Honeywell (Greenberg), from IIASA (Edwards), from Lawrence Livermore Labs (myself), from USC (Dyer), and so on. (Edwards and I had left the AI lab already, for other reasons.) So the picture of Symbolics depopulating an entire huge community is an exaggeration.

Second, an open source community only works when there is a degree of cooperation between the people with commit rights. For various reasons, this cooperation had broken down in the Lisp machine project, particularly between RMS on one hand and everybody else on the other hand. There was no sustainable way to continue to operate in a "shared everything" mode.

Third, Symbolics was entirely without power to make the Lisp machine software "free" or "open source" or anything else. The software had been copyrighted by MIT. Symbolics licensed the software from MIT; we paid quite a lot of money for it, and the contract that we signed with MIT certainly did not give us the right to distribute the software to anyone who came along. Yet in RMS's account, Symbolics is entirely responsible for the software's not being "free".

Fourth, RMS's characterization of Symbolics as "refus[ing] to help my fellow hacker" would be widely disputed by many, many members of the AI community, who were helped immensely in their work by having a high-quality, commercially-supported Lisp machine. There are more ways to help your fellows than to make your software "free".

Fifth, even if it had been possible to make the software "free" or "open source" (which it was not, but supposing it had been), that entire model did not exist at the time and it was hardly obvious that such a model would ever work. (Stallman even admits this in his book; see page 16, paragraph starting "A third assumption...".) Symbolics did many things that were, in retrospect, wrong, because we were following the prevailing paradigm for computer companies rather than moving with the times (e.g. portable operating systems, COTS hardware, etc.). -- DanielWeinreb 05:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * The first section of this article contains significant POV text, which, apparently from the date of Daniel Weinreb's comment, has been in the article for a long time. It should be cleaned up. RoyLeban (talk) 06:20, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Scott McKay needs disambiguation
The Scott McKay who was at Symbolics, and mentioned in this article, is not the Scott_McKay referenced. JohnAspinall 20:52, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

"description of the symbol. Help with locating it"
I'm not sure what this heading is asking for -- could the original person who wrote this explain what they're looking for? --Zippy 23:36, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Aaah, ooh, perfect!!
We need bad guys in OpenSource, on whose actions our heroes (Stallman and such) might make a bright contrast. Bless the memory of Symbolics! May they rest in peace! Said: Rursus (☻) 12:40, 8 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Kindly remember this isn't a general discussion forum, but about the article. --Gwern (contribs) 17:54 8 October 2008 (GMT)

Scaling on screen shot
The screen shots are monochrome bitmaps and when Mediawiki resizes them it creates 1-bit thumbnails. This prevents any anti-aliasing from being done, so they are absolutely unreadable when resized. Does it make sense to reload them as PNG files with an 8-bit grayscale color map? I tried converting it to a grayscale GIF, but it appears that at some stage it reverted to being 1-bit on my first try. Even with 8-bit grayscale, it still seems to not do any anti-aliasing on the resize. Autopilot (talk) 19:36, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Software ownership
I was told today that someone I know acquired all of Symbolics' software IP from the deceased former owner's estate, as an in-kind payment of debts owed by the decedent. Since I have a conflict of interest, I'm not going to edit the article to mention this. 18.26.0.5 (talk) 21:34, 11 January 2012 (UTC)