On 7/29/07, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 7/29/07, Pablo De Napoli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > William (and others): > > > > There is a licence issue about Sage raised by GPL-v3, that may be you > > need to consider > > (I'm not a lawyer so that what I'm saying could be wrong). > > This comes up in sage-devel about once every other month. > Thanks for revisiting the question. > > > Currently according to the COPYING file, Sage is released under GPL version > > 2. > > > > This is correct. It is currently forced on SAGE because I think > at least one of the libraries SAGE depends upon, e.g., PARI, is > GPL V2 only. > > > The problem is that some packages included in Sage will be soon relicence > > under > > GPL-version 3, for example GNU GSL version 1.10 will certainly released > > under > > GPL-version 3 (and so will be most FSF stuff). > > You're right, SAGE won't include any GPL V3 only packages until SAGE itself > is relicensed GPL V3. That won't happen until every component > of SAGE is relicensed under a GPL V3 compatible license. > > > If I understand things well, you cannot link such a library to a > > GPL-v2 project, without > > releasing the whole project under GPL-v3, am I right? > > If this is true, then it might be necesary to consider relicensing > > Sage under GPL-v3. > > But this would mean to get explicit permision from all Sage contributors > > (Since Sage is not released "under GPL-v2 and any later version..." > > but explicitey under "GPL-v2") > > > Yes, I cannot release SAGE under GPL V3 until: > > 1. Every single component of SAGE, including PARI, > is licensed under a GPL V3 compatible license, and > > 2. I get permission from all copyright holders of new code included > in the SAGE library itself (probably >= 50 people) to switch from > GPL V2 to "GPL V2 or later". > > I could start with 2. without having to wait for 1. The problem is > that it's a lot of busywork that I have no desire whatever to deal > with, since I much prefer doing mathematics and coding. > > My current plan is to stop including new > versions of any packages that switch to GPL V3 only licenses, > wait to see what happens with all the packages that SAGE depends > on that are currently not GPL V3 compatible, then revisit this > questions later. We should also watch to see how the Debian > project deals with GPLv3 problems. It will be interesting > to see how the Linux kernel deals with this issue, since they > also have copyright spread over hundreds of people and I > think they are currently GPL V2 only. > > Does that sound reasonable to sage-devel?
Sounds good to me.. BTW, anything I contributed can be released under "GPL v2 or later". Also, I checked that GAP is distributed that way http://www.gap-system.org/Download/copyright.html > > William > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
