On Oct 30, 2006, at 4:21 AM, William Stein wrote:
> > On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 03:26:06 -0800, David Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >> >> I assume you want to do 2 things: >> 1. translate their PDE solver (numerical or symbolic?), >> 2. translate the DG computation package. >> For 2, I'd contact the guy who presented the work at the >> conference and >> tell him what you'd like to do. Better yet, you could ask him for >> help. > > Josh told me that guy had to sign an NDA, so he can't be of any help, > for fear of being sued by Maplesoft. > >> For 1, I imagine this would be quite difficult and don't see that >> "copying" would be an issue. > > My understanding of copyright is that it would be a huge issues. > It could cause massive problems for SAGE. My understanding is > that if one reads the source code of a program then types something > in another language, that new version is a derived work. To do > this with maple code may be a blatant violation of their copyright, > which would be a huge pain. Likewise, if Maple (or MAGMA) > employees were to read source code of SAGE and type in a program > based on what they read, then copyright it as their own with > releasing it under hte GPL, they would definitely be breaking the law. > That's my understanding at least, and I've been told this many > times... > >> Maple is Pascal-like, as is GAP, and >> is much different than Python. You'd probably end up rewriting an >> enormous amount of code, finding your own improvements along the way. My understanding is similar. I would consider this (depending on how many changes are being made) to be the same case as translating works between, say, English and French, where the translated work is copyrightable, but it remains under the restrictions of the original copyright as well. Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
