Subject: [clisp-list] William Schelter

From: Bruno Haible <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Sep 14 09:37:02 2001

Dear all,

It is with great sadness and sorrow that I heard about the death of
Bill Schelter. It happened a few weeks ago.
http://ww.telent.net/lisp/free-the-x3j-thirteen/2001.08.html

Many of us know him from GCL. But he also released to the world the
first free computer algebra system, Maxima, and is the author of the
first GCC machine description for i386.

He shared with all of us the fruits of his labour, even though it
meant extra effort for him: On the GCL side, he had to maintain AKCL
as a "set of patches" on top of KCL because the KCL copyright didn't
allow to release the entire source at once. On the Maxima side, he had
to deal with unclear copyright issues between MIT, Symbolics and
others. Releasing free software was not trivial in the 80ies. We are
grateful he did it.

Like anyone in the world, his life had ups and downs. He had a dark
time two years ago, and I'm glad he found love and happiness again
before his death.

You can visit his homepage at http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/

Bruno

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From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Sep 15 11:10:01 2001

One side consequence of William Schelter's death is that we are
looking for new maintainers for GCL and Maxima.  If anyone wants to
volunteer, please contact me.