the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem
This is why I created https://wukix.com/mocl. CL has a ton of merits. It's unfortunate that people pass over CL because it's "old" or whatever (a worthless criterion if there ever was one). The language is great, and with a little house cleaning, CL can seriously kick ass.
Wow, I haven't seen the licensing model to use a language in a while. Many researchers are migrating away from MATLAB for that reason, and new projects are often not initiated in MATLAB unless it incorporates legacy code. How's this business model holding up?
Nitpick: It's not licensing for a language, it's licensing for a specific tool. Common Lisp itself is not proprietary (having a standard) and code can be portable across implementations.
To answer your question, I would say that the business model (of charging for licenses) is fine in principle, but developer tools is a very difficult business to be in.
Have you considered a student price, I like the idea of having CL on my phone (and eventually tablet) but the price is a bit step for me (and presumably other students) especially to get source code access.
This is why I created https://wukix.com/mocl. CL has a ton of merits. It's unfortunate that people pass over CL because it's "old" or whatever (a worthless criterion if there ever was one). The language is great, and with a little house cleaning, CL can seriously kick ass.