I find it hard to believe there is an objection to using software 
and making modification without submitting patches.

On Wednesday, July 3, 2024 at 9:23:11 PM UTC-4 Waldek Hebisch wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 04, 2024 at 08:21:35AM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On 7/4/24 06:41, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jul 03, 2024 at 11:18:05PM +0200, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> > > > On 7/3/24 12:19, Qian Yun wrote:
> > > > > Well, generally this feels a bit strange on multiple levels:
> > > > > 1. they use such an old version
> > > > > 2. they don't send bugs or upstream fixes to us
> > > > 
> > > > Citing item 2 of our Licence.txt
> > > > 
> > > > - Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
> > > > notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
> > > > the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
> > > > distribution.
> > > > 
> > > > Honestly, just looking at their website, I do not even see FriCAS 
> mentioned
> > > > at all in an easily accessible form. I find this inaccaptable.
> > > > 
> > > > I do not have "the distribution", but if it comes without explicitly
> > > > reproducing our Licence conditions, then we should certainly react.
> > > 
> > > Assuming that ')copyright' works in their copy of FriCAS I think that
> > > they are covered from legal side (IANAL). And assuming that they keep
> > > normal FriCAS banner (identifying binary as FriCAS and giving info 
> about
> > > ')copyright') that looks more or less OK.
> > 
> > There were bugs with ')copyright' on windows in older releases.
> > But their release only includes "algebra/" and "AXIOMSys.exe",
> > no "etc/" or "share/", so may not include our copy of license.
> > Or they could hide it in their lengthy EULA, or maybe not.
>
> To comply with the our license, they should have text of the
> license _somewhere_. Recursive grep for 'Numerical ALgorithms Group'
> should find it (unless it is really obfuscated in some way).
>
> > The banner is fully shown, unmodified.
>
> I guess that given name interested folks can use Google to find
> FriCAS license. But I do not think that internet counts as
> 'materials provided with the distribution'.
>
> > > Concerning bug fixes and patches, in relative terms we got infintely
> > > more from Sage folks, but contribution from Sage folks is rather
> > > small part of overall contributions to FriCAS. So I am not
> > > surprised that there are no visible conftibution from Mathcad.
> > > 
> > 
> > Sage doesn't develop new domains, MathCAD does. So they are more likely
> > to hit by bugs.
>
> Not clear to me. Usig Spad code means that they may be affected
> by bugs in the Spad compiler. OTOH for simple constructs Spad
> compiler was quite reliable. And using Spad they are less
> affected by interpreter bugs.
>
> > But as for the "82 new domains" I mentioned above, there is
> > "EXPR.NRLIB", looks like it is modified for MathcadDisplayCategory.
> > Other than that, all new domains, which means they really do not
> > have an internal bug fix tree.
>
> We do not know. In principle they could patch implementations,
> that would not change generated databases. If you want to
> know you could try testcases for fixed bugs.
>
> Much depends on what they actually use. Some things, like basic
> operations on polynomials with integer/rational coefficients are
> quite stable, and I do not remember any related bugs. Other things
> may be worked around in wrappers.
>
> One, likely possibility is that they developed what they need
> around 2018 and keep using essentially the same thing.
>
> -- 
> Waldek Hebisch
>

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