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Comment by LispSporks22 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we can save up and buy it from this dude, then open it something like what happened with Blender? I hate the idea of hobbyist licenses - it reminds me of the torturous OpenVMS hobbyist program or whatever the hell that incomprehensible situation is.

Also, curious how old is the IP owner in this situation? What happens if he croaks with it?

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As with any asset, it would become part of his estate, to be sold to pay its debts and/or divided among his heirs or left in his will. It may result in another opportunity for someone to acquire it at probate.

AFAIK Symbolics is basically a one-man operation, and the owner has been unwilling to sell the rights to Genera for any price.

Damn that’s too bad. Part of computing history and all.. wonder why he is motivated that way

Maybe he's still hoping to use it to implement his "wish": http://web.archive.org/web/20011107164802/www.ai.mit.edu/peo...

"Wish List: a knowledge-based operating system running on a MIMD parallel machine. The system should exceed the productivity of the Lisp Machine by several orders of magnitude and integrate seamlessly with a global knowledge base and with a global computational environment."

Looks like he recently registered a new company: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_nh/872107

i doubt he was offered >= 1 bln $. that's probably the price he's waiting for

Does he actually have any connection to Genera or even Symbolics?

He developed a well-known web server for Genera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL-HTTP

DKS doesn't own the IP, and wouldn't sell (to me at least) any unpublished sources, schematics, etc. for any price at all.

As of several years ago, though, he was willing to part with a number of new-old-stock Ivory CPUs, for roughly the cost of their weight in gold. (And periodically offers Ivory machines for sale on eBay. Here's what these look like: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2857 )

AFAIK it's still owned by one John Mallery, a wealthy MIT prof with military and intelligence establishment connections.

My favourite "conspiratorial" hypothesis concerning this question is that the Symbolics IP was ordered to be perma-buried for "national security" reasons (as it threatens to make practical systems with capabilities much superior to today's state of the art, but running on early 1990s IC fab processes) and that Mallery (who, per rumour, purchased the IP for next to nothing via a backroom deal) was the designated undertaker.

AFAIK it is still unknown whether the chip die masks, source for (the parts not included on the tapes/CD) os/compiler/IC workflow -- was even preserved to this day.

Just learned about blender's initial proprietary beginnings. It's interesting that they found the most success with the open source model.

In the Blender case, the community bought the trademark and copyrights from the commercial owners (some VC investors if I remember correctly). https://www.blender.org/about/history/ Those donors are still listed in a file in the Blender source: https://github.com/blender/blender/blob/main/doc/license/bf-...

It probably can't be understated though how important it was that Ton, the original author was spearheading that whole thing. He would have had both an existing relationship with the investors, and enough clout with the community backers to envision a future for it... trust which was obviously well placed.

> https://www.blender.org/about/history/

citing from the link:

> On Sunday, October 13th, 2002, Blender was released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence, the strictest possible open-source contract. Not only would Blender be free, but its source code would remain free, forever, to be used for any purpose whatsoever.

keep this in mind when you pick a software license.

Yes, it's a good choice, guaranteeing continuing freedom.

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