Very good news regarding the Tachyon3d license! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jun 1, 2007 8:06 PM Subject: Re: Fwd: Tachyon3d License To: William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
William, Yes, I'll update the license for you and post a new version. Please give me a couple of days as it's not convenient for me to take care of this right now. Cheers, John Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 02:44:23PM -0700, William Stein wrote: > Dear John, > > Could you please release a new version of Tachyon3d > (http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/) that is licensed under > the modern BSD license, i.e., remove this point from the Copyright file: > > * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software > * must display the following acknowledgement: > * This product includes software developed by John E. Stone > > More Details: > > I'm the lead developer for the SAGE project, which is a mathematical > software > system that uses Tachyon3d for its 3d rendering: > http://www.sagemath.org > For example, the 5-dimensional cube graph on the right of the above page > was made using Tachyon3d. > > We're probably one of the main projects using Tachyon3d at this point. > E.g., if you search for tachyon3d in Google you'll get a bunch of SAGE > pages at the top, and a search for "tachyon ray tracer" in Google (no > quotes) > a SAGE page come up as the third hit. > > Unfortunately, today when auditing the software licenses for all components > of > SAGE, I found out that Tachyon3d is licensed under the orginal BSD > license, which is GPL incompatible. It is thus a violation of the GPL for > me to combine Tachyon3d with a GPL'd program. So I either have to > remove Tachyon3d from SAGE, or you could release a new version of > Tachyon3d under the modified BSD license. Note that even Berkeley > changed the copyright of all its code to the new license, since they > realized > releasing under the old BSD license was a serious mistake: > ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change > > This article discusses many of the issues with GPL-compatibility: > http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html > > This page explains why the old BSD license is a poor choice: > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html > For example, "When people put many such programs together in an > operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a > software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a > different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would > need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, > but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different > sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. > In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would > not be surprised if the list has grown by now." > > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://www.williamstein.org > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://www.williamstein.org -- NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 217-244-3349 WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Fax: 217-244-6078 -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://www.williamstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
