It's really a bummer that whoever it is who bought the Symbolics intellectual property at probate* hasn't been more open about their plans for it or how they will be opening it up to the world.
The Symbolics intellectual property doesn't have much direct value today; their patents are all expired and licensing revenue can't be significant. However it has a huge amount of historical value, and it would be amazing to eventually have a runnable system available legally for free (rather than for the thousands of dollars the VLM still costs) and to have on GitHub a complete and accurate history of the code for the Genera operating system, the hardware microcode and FEP/console code, and the various applications.
* It's rumored that the creator of CL-HTTP was the buyer. I was actually starting to look into purchasing it myself (with the intent of freeing it as much as possible, starting a project to get it on GitHub, etc.) when I found it had been bought.
The Symbolics intellectual property doesn't have much direct value today; their patents are all expired and licensing revenue can't be significant. However it has a huge amount of historical value, and it would be amazing to eventually have a runnable system available legally for free (rather than for the thousands of dollars the VLM still costs) and to have on GitHub a complete and accurate history of the code for the Genera operating system, the hardware microcode and FEP/console code, and the various applications.
* It's rumored that the creator of CL-HTTP was the buyer. I was actually starting to look into purchasing it myself (with the intent of freeing it as much as possible, starting a project to get it on GitHub, etc.) when I found it had been bought.