OpenMusic

Saying that a Ferarri or a good Swiss watch or building an oil rafinery is expensive, because one doesn't want or can't buy it, just for the sake of it, is without sense. Cost as an absolute number is often meaningless. It gets a meaning in terms of value it could or does provide. For example, where I live, a not big appartent costs about 1500 EUR per month to rent. Is that expensive? Sure - everythign above 0 is expensive. But for me the value provided that I have a roof over the head is greater then the absolute cost. Well, I have lived also in places where this price for a similar appartment is about 100 EUR. Is that cheap? No - in comparison to the local purchasing power - no. But again - the value for me has been more important. Do I like the pricing of let say Oracle? Why should I.. But I can generate more value for clients and/or me using Oracle while using it in comparison to waiting around and telling everyone, that Oracle is expensive. As far as I know even in the most broken economies of the world, software developers can provide value for customers which exceeds the 1200 EUR initial and later 300 EUR per year of maintenance. If they can't, the problem is usually not the price of LW, but unemployment or impossibility to find paying clients for all possible economic or personal reasons beyond the price of LW.

If you read earlier posts - you would have known, that if you just want to learn about LW or Common Lisp in general - there are plenty of options - LW provides a "Personal Edition" with the price of 0, or academic pricing as well as evaluation licenses. Outside of LW you have at least (in no particular order) SBCL, CLISP, ClozureCL, ABCL, ECL, which are all at least open source, some under GPL and most of them are pretty fine products too. So - as we both see - your problem is not actually in the 1200.

Concerning OM: you can experience Open Music without the need to recompile it and THEN decide if the cost of the possibility to recompile it is of value FOR YOU greater then the price of LW. Again - this is not fault of LW or the authors of OM. It's just your decision AFTER you know how worth not just using or writing plugins for OM, but also changing OM itself is valuable to you. It's your choice and you are free to take it. If you say no - no one is insulted :)

Cheers

While I can't talk in the name of LW, as a former customer I can assert that we had not a single support case which took more than 2 days (where some have been hairy). The main reason is that there is no "first level support" - you talk directly with the authors of the complier/IDE/libs. And they fundamentally know their product and over the decade or two they have seen lot of possible misinteractions of the product with the underlying (often misconfgured) OS/networking/UI/.. etc. Bugs in LW are mostly in corner cases which can be solved usually with a small patch (where it's distribution is less painfull as in most other products - being a Common Lisp - they sometims can issue a patch even for a running system..) The only time their team needed about 3 weeks (where I'm not the only customer) has been, when we requested the introduction of a new data type in the language and producing a highly optimized machine code for it (try this with MS/Apple/Oracle or any of the open source languages in terms of money/time/quiality...). This has been a request for a change, a not a but report, which affects their compiler infrastructure for at least Win32/64, OSX, Linux and FreeBSD. I got the new functionality as part of the support contract! No additional cent, even it's not a bug! If you know how multiplatform compilers look inside, you will know that what they did is impressive and has been delivered essentially for free.

> Believe it or not our problems existed (professor included, happened during assignment reviews) but as new users we decided to just finish the assignment and move on. Subconsciously we felt it was a better return of investment for our time.

I believe you. That's why I still wonder why your professor hasn't taken action on it. While you can have been young and not enough knowledgable about CL, he IS the one who knows not only CL, but also LW. So - from what you tell me I see only that you have got a bad beat by being with the wrong situation during exams and drawing conclusions about the general state of LW, which is actually quite different (at least for the most of it's users) from what you describe.

> User Experience 101: when new users of your product face problems, they don't contact support and just leave as soon as possible for an alternative.

This is for sure true for mass products for unqualified public (for example an Iphone or a car). But take any essentially complex software (Let say the JVM or a helicopter or a bigger cargo ship or in our case LW). If it delivers real value - customers and producers often work hand in hand, setup organization and procedures to deal with problems on both sides etc. to resolve the problems, because usually the net gain of a working product is for the customer is higher than a couple of hiccups or some $$$. This has been and is still a working model for most of the IT industry (at least in the bigger part of the IT industry where products/services are payed with money and responsibility is guaranteed by at least through contracts).

> Support is there for people who already use the product and/or have no alternatives (which LispWorks has many).

Of course the support is for people who use a product :) And of course if the car breaks which you drive, even if you have alternatives, usually you go to a garage to get it repaired instead of just throwing it away and byuing a new one :) And of course there are alternatives to LW, some with great communities, and in all of which from time to time you also need support, as soon you are a customer :) But you know that :)