On 7/29/07, Alec Mihailovs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: "Bobby Moretti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >
> > It would be one thing if SAGE was just a distribution of software,
> > with a package management system. But SAGE contains (lots) of code
> > that wraps these libraries and provides a unified interface to them.
> > I'm fairly confident that this falls under the GPL's concept of
> > 'linking'.
>
> That's not exactly clear (at least for me). Anyway - it seems mostly a
> theoretical problem. From practical point of view, if SAGE would use
> different FSF licences for different parts of it, it seems impossible that,
> say, PARI, or GAP, would sue it for that. Axiom - maybe (just a joke :), but
> it doesn't seem to be a part of SAGE.
I take the copyright and licensing issues with SAGE extremely seriously,
and I am committed to not violating any copyright or license statements
in anything released as part of SAGE. This is a basic principle of
respect for other open source software authors and project to which
I believe the SAGE project should very carefully adhere.
Also, SAGE is three separate but complementary things:
(1) a distribution of open source math software,
(2) a new mathematical software library that ties together (1), and
(3) a way to use most existing mathematical software via a common
interface.
It would be possible to distribute (1) without very many worries
about licenses. It is not possible to legally distribute (2) without
carefully respecting what various software licenses say about derived
works. I sometimes worry about how (3) fits into things, but hopefully
the situation is similar to how one can legally use a program from
bash -- but are there weird legal issues with doing this:
sage: mathematica(2) + gap(2)
4
-- William
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