Symbolics OpenGenera to go free for non-commercial use
25 points by lproven
25 points by lproven
About twenty years ago I think I would have been very excited about this (unless my FOSS radicalism had led me to reject it). In my own personal journey, this is much too late, and I no longer believe these highly integrated environments are a good idea, let alone that the OpenGenera code has any particular worth anymore (but some of its ideas may still be relevant). This part of the website is funny to me:
Symbolics Genera is the integrated programming environment for serious work in symbolic and generative AI.
Generative AI on OpenGenera, really? This sounds like they're trying to profit off the current AI trend, but surely they do not actually expect to earn any profits from OpenGenera? And in what sense is OpenGenera better for "serious work" in generative AI than the basic setup of a Python REPL with PyTorch on a GPU?
It's really sad that after decades the best they can do is a proprietary license and a pivot to AI slop. Symbolics was an important part of computing history that should be freely accessible to all at this point.
It seems like Symbolics' business model has always been to try to attach itself to whatever is trendy. The company arose out of an early AI bubble obviously, and in the material from the 90s they call everything "object-oriented", and I also remember that the Lisp companies of the early 2000s pushed the "semantic web" heavily.
This is a misrepresentation of the actual history. Symbolics did not "attach itself" to AI, it began when one of the earliest AI research labs built a computer for its own use because the existing COTS options weren't good enough and then decided that maybe someone else would want it. Naturally it was going to be marketed to other AI researchers. This computer was heavily inspired by the Xerox Alto which was designed around the same time, and its system software was built using an object system called Flavors, obviously inspired by Smalltalk. Symbolics started selling its own version of the MIT AI Lab computer in 1981, same year when Xerox finally brought the Alto technology to market as the Star workstation, clearly they were leading the object-oriented trend or fad rather than following it.
I am aware of the history. I merely find it curious that Symbolics' fortunes have always been attached (or attempted to be attached) to trendy subjects.
Remember when the VMS Hobbyist Program, through arbitrary and highly restrictive licensing, kicked off a huge resurgence of interest that made VMS the major force in operating systems it is today?
yeah me neither
profit off the current AI trend
Similarly, https://gtoolkit.com/ is a really cool smalltalk system which sells itself short spouting AI everywhere. It was cooler and more comprehensible last year.
I still run a lot of my (Linux/Xorg) environment integration via Common Lisp… but yeah, I need things to drive general Linux software as needed!
I have long explicitly not-believed in hermetic tightly integrated environments being viable in the modern world full of garbage formats…
After being ported to x86 and Arm it was renamed to Portable Genera. The linked post doesn't use the outdated name.