Insightful writing from the Lisp expert Kent Pitman.
https://nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html tells the story of how Kent was involved in the ANSI standardization effort for Common Lisp, including the following statement about copyright:
the US Code for copyright [USC17] is rather specific on this point. The code pretty clearly says that “Copyright protection subsists [...] in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression” and goes on to say, “In no case does copyright protection for an original work extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” In other words, copyright protects the form of an idea but not the idea itself.
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Half-Baked/index-spiel.html This work is a response to the split between the Lisp1 and Lisp2 communities (as described in Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells). One idea here is to define a Lisp Omega which has an unbounded number of namespaces, and a macro facility on top it that unifies the two universes by allowing programs in the two languages to refer to each other, making the issue of namespace be one of "personal choice". First bookmarked Mon Jul 2 14:24:49 2007
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/sysdef.lisp.txt From Zach Beane's bookmarks. To quote him "Compare to asdf.lisp and cry." I might do this (comparing ;) one day. First bookmarked Thu Nov 30 21:22:06 2006