I just sent the following message to OpenMCL-Devel:

Hello CCL Users –

I’m happy to officially announce our pledge drive to raise funds to improve the CCL IDE. Now is your chance to help us build a development environment that is worthy of the great CCL compiler and runtime that we already have.

Our goal is to raise $20,000 in pledges. This will allow us to put substantial dedicated effort into the CCL IDE. We want to take it from its current wobbly alpha state and turn it into a solid stable development environment for Common Lisp.

The priorities for our work will be set by the people who fund the project. So far these priorities include:

Improving and stabilizing the editor. (Think Fred.) Completing the other existing IDE tools (Processes, Apropos, Inspect, Search Files). Adding additional features and tools to the editor and the IDE (e.g. multiple-font support). Simplifying the installation and build process to make CCL available to more users, including Lisp newbies. Reorganizing the source code to encourage future development by the CCL community.

We currently have $6,000 in pledges. Our goal is to reach $20,000 by November 15th. To keep this effort manageable, we are seeking pledges of $500 or more.

Please consider making a pledge. If you’re on this e-mail list, there’s a good chance you use Clozure CL. As Free Open-Source Software, we don’t make any money from sales of CCL or licensing fees for applications written in CCL. We’re able to fund some development ourselves. But to get beyond that — as we’d like to do with the IDE — we need your help.

If you’d like to make a pledge, please contact me (alms@clozure.com) and we can set up a time to talk about your priorities and the amount you’d like to pledge. We can also do that by e-mail, if you prefer.

Thanks in advance for your consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours,

Andrew Shalit

Clozure Associates