March 12, 2002
Commercial Lisp Success (with Free Software)

Don Geddis' $250M lisp success story (Paul Graham and Robert Morris got about $50M, so they were obviously only 20% as successful) on cmucl-impl:

My company was a comparison shopping web site called Cadabra. We did all our development in Franz's Allegro CL. They were so excited, we wrote up a silly press blurb for them: http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/cadabra.lhtml

In January 2000, Cadabra sold to GoTo.com (now Overture Services, NASDAQ:OVER) for $250M (in stock -- worth _much_ less over time!). As part of the acquisition, we converted the application from ACL to CMUCL in a month or so, to escape from Franz's severe licensing demands.

Sadly, about a year ago Overture shut down their comparison shopping division. So the software is no longer in use.

"Franz's severe licensing demands" sure sound familiar. It's the same reason we're trying to use cmucl at i/net.

Posted by jjwiseman at March 12, 2002 02:36 PM
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