
Light Table 0.7.0 - one-more-minute
http://lighttable.com/2014/11/19/light-table-070/
======
tiffanyh
So how is Chris (et al.) planning to make Light Table a sustainable business
(e.g. "pay the bills").

It's great they have the kickstarter money but I haven't seen any
announcements on them making this a product for sale. If anything, it appears
they are doing the exact OPPOSITE and distancing themselves from the project
all together.

~~~
e12e
Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?".
Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many
other such products still survive just fine.

~~~
dagw
True, but Emacs, gcc and Linux didn't take millions of VC dollars.

~~~
e12e
Did lighttable? I thought EVE got the VC funding and LT was kickstarted?

------
zurn
It would be cool to see some videos of the current LightTable, since it was
the demo videos of the original prototype that made its name originally.

FWIW I remember trying LT once post-open sourcing and ran out of enthusiasm
before I could figure out how to see any of the "cool stuff from the video".

~~~
krat0sprakhar
+1 to this. I really want to give LightTable a shot. Whenever a new release is
announced, I hurriedly download it, open it and then realize that I don't know
what to do with it. Eventually I end up uninstalling it and going back to good
ol' Vim.

A couple of videos highlighting some cool features for Clojure, Python and
Javascript development would be of great help!

~~~
jamii
The video on the front page of [http://lighttable.com](http://lighttable.com)
was made in April. Most of the changes since then have just been bug fixes so
its pretty representative of the current state. Now that we've removed the
bottlenecks on outside contributors the pace is picking up again.

------
james33
Well this is a pleasant surprise. I was rather disappointed by the last
announcement as I felt Light Table was a nice start and was heading in a great
direction. As one of the KS backers, I'm glad to see the effort was put in to
make it easy for the community to keep it going.

------
pnathan
What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped
from a company...

~~~
deng
Yeah, I did not get that either. I also do not understand why the GPLv3 would
necessitate a contributor agreement, but MIT would not. I always thought those
agreements were necessary so that one institution has copyright and can change
the license without getting approval from every author. That applies to any
free license, doesn't it? Anyway, I think they just wanted to change to MIT
before new authors commit without an CA, after which they cannot change it so
easily.

~~~
jamii
The decisions were largely separate.

The goal of having a CA was to leave us the option of selling commercial
plugins in the future. We no longer plan to do that so we got rid of it.

Separately, we kept hearing that the GPL is a hurdle to adoption at some
companies so we switched to MIT.

~~~
michaelsbradley
Why not adopt the _Eclipse Public License_ (EPL), which is the license used
for Clojure/Script and the majority of open source Clojure libraries?

[http://opensource.org/licenses/EPL-1.0](http://opensource.org/licenses/EPL-1.0)

~~~
mkesper
The EPL is incompatible with GPL, so you lose another group.

~~~
michaelsbradley
That makes sense, but then it begs the question of why Light Table was
originally distributed under the GPL, i.e. since it's built from EPL'd
software... and the GPL is incompatible with the EPL, as you say.

Does Light Table's new MIT license insulate developers from EPL-GPL
compatibility concerns that might arise from the EPL'd pieces (Clojure/Script,
et al.) used to build it?

~~~
lmm
A compiler or similar tool doesn't generally affect the license of its output
(some of them explicitly disclaim that), just as a text editor doesn't affect
the copyright of a novel written in it. The GPL is much more widely popular
than the EPL, and now that it contains comparable patent language it is
probably a better license to use (when the EPL was first written it was
primarily to address patent issues that the GPLv2 didn't cover). I would hope
that projects that are using the EPL would now migrate towards the GPL where
possible - strong copyleft licenses are inherently impossible to combine, so
it's best if the community can standardize on just one.

The MIT license is compatible with almost everything - it's really very
minimal, comparable to a 2-clause BSD-style license. There is no problem
combining MIT licensed components with EPL licensed components, or with GPLed
components. (Of course there is still a problem if you want to combine with
both at the same time)

------
ohfunkyeah
Anyone know of a good update to the discussion that happened here?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874324)
I'm curious how the concept of light table has stacked up against reality in
the past year.

~~~
mberning
Out of curiosity I just downloaded it and tried it out on a JS project I am
working on. To me the biggest and most interesting feature is the evaluation
of code anywhere, so I decided to try that. Aside from it needing a browser to
do anything with JS I noticed that it generated a bunch of errors when I tried
to evaluate a block of code. Maybe it is awesome for clojure, but for JS I
think it has a long way to go. Back to webstorm for me.

~~~
cldwalker
I've been using JS eval fine. Feel free to open an issue on
[https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues](https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues)
as described in
[https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/CONTRIB...](https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#bugs)

------
johnsmith32
I really dislike how so many editors bind the evaluation/compile/menu key to
ctrl + space or ctrl + shift. On the default multilingual key setting on
windows, it is especially annoying when you want to run the code but instead
your typing language changes to chinese

~~~
philbarr
I think that's more the fault of windows than anything else. I mean, why do I
need a shortcut key for changing language? I'm going to do that so often I
need a shortcut do I? Nope.

Always turned off for me.

~~~
aninhumer
For people in multilingual environments, that shortcut key is absolutely
necessary.

~~~
philbarr
Fair enough - that never occurred to me. I assume that there are a lot of
people in that situation then? For it to be on by default?

~~~
johnsmith32
It is a problem mainly in Asia and countries which has unique characters in
their alphabet e.g. russia cyrllic, the baltic states, certain romance
languages which requires a large amount of accents e.g. french

------
nickik
Very nice. I hope this project keeps living. I use it for all my clojure dev
and sometimes just as a editor. I rarly use the repl anymore, I just build up
function inside the editor. The only thing that hinders this is that the
function output should be pritty printed but there is some technical problem
with that. If this would happen, I would not use the console much anymore.

The paredit is nice enougth to make working with clojure nicer then working
with other language syntaxes.

Overall I really like it because I feel like its the way a IDE should be even
if its lacking features, the architecture is nice.

------
da4c30ff
I wonder how many people contributed under the assumption that their
contributions would remain under GPL. I assume the CLA specifies their right
to change the license?

~~~
lgas
I'm not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that the existing licenses still
apply to the existing code but new versions can always be licensed under a new
license (on each release if they wanted), because of the very fact that it's
just that: a new release.

~~~
Argorak
The important point is that they have a CLA and that one contains copyright
assignment. The company behind LightTable holds all rights on your
contributions. As the copyright holder, they can change the license however
they wish.

~~~
mkesper
Well, a good CLA should prevent them from going non-free.

~~~
Argorak
"Good" is a definition that differs, depending of the side you are on.

Also, what is "non-free"? Some FOSS advocates would say that they just did
that, because it now allows building non-free derivatives for everyone without
user-rights to the source.

~~~
icebraining
Who claims that releasing software under non-copyleft licenses like MIT and
BSD is non-free?

~~~
Argorak
Let's start with the man himself: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-
misses-the-point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.html). He would call it "open", but not "free".

The point is that the free software movement views things from the end-users
perspective: the user is entitled to see and use the source of every binary
blob they get delivered and use. That's an important point of the GPL. FOSS is
all about freedom for users.

MIT allows the _developer_, who is not necessary the user, to modify the
source, build a binary blob and deliver that to users without ever letting
them see the source. The freedom from the users perspective is 0, except those
that the developer gives them in their terms of service. MIT is all about
freedom for developers.

Which one is the "free" your CLA aims for?

The ambiguity problem with using the term "free" is a well-known issue.

~~~
icebraining
_Let 's start with the man himself: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-
source-misses-the-point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-
misses-the-point....). He would call it "open", but not "free"._

I don't think you understood his essay. He's talking about the differences in
_philosophy_ between the two approaches, but he doesn't claim that non-
copyleft licenses are non-free. In fact, he says that _" Nearly all open
source software is free software"_, and has a page listing MIT, BSD, Apache,
etc as Free licenses: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html)

------
logn
If you're going to do an MIT license, why not just Apache 2.0? That offers
some protection against patent trolling. And the Apache license can still
require an attribution notice like the MIT license.

------
bachback
Good news! I'm going to switch from Emacs some of the time, and hopefully 100%
eventually. The thing that bugged me was how uneven the way editor would react
in some cases. For me it didn't have the reliability I need. I was interested
in the fundamentals and found underneath is code-mirror. I thought eventually
all code-editing should move into a browser, but isn't quite there yet.
Hopefully this will move to 1.0 and be a full emacs replacement.

~~~
mardurhack
Hi, just out of curiosity what pushed you away from Emacs? I was planning to
learn how to use it but your comment made me think...

------
wldcordeiro
I've considered using Light Table for a while but the fact that there isn't a
simple way to install it on Linux (either via apt or another package manager
or a packaged version like a deb/rpm) keeps me from bothering.

~~~
moron4hire
So downloading a tarball and unpacking it is not simple enough?

~~~
wldcordeiro
Apparently you need to also do the things described in this readme to get it
working properly. [https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable#initial-
setup](https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable#initial-setup)

~~~
moron4hire
Either this is for building from source, or it has backslid into bullshit
territory, because I've used it on both Windows _and_ Linux without doing any
of that.

~~~
jamii
That's for building from source, which is only necessary if you want to back
on Light Table itself or write a plugin.

------
vim-guru
That's one buggy release! At least on Yosemite. It breaks exposé. Vim-mode
only partially works now and evaluation of JavaScript is entirely foobar.

------
btreecat
I am not really sure what Light Table is and the announcement does not provide
any information as such.

~~~
ibdthor
The blog posts might get a little long if we prefaced all of them with a
description of Light Table, but hopefully lighttable.com can provide you with
all the information you're looking for :)

------
JBiserkov
Aaand the menus are gone?!

I'm on Win8.1 x64

~~~
ZenoArrow
Do they come up if you press the Alt key?

~~~
mring33621
Win 7 x64. No menus. Alt key does nothing.

