Martin Rubey wrote: > "Michael Abshoff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > writes:
[somehow Martin's reply didn't make it onto sage-devel (yet)] > >> > * licensing issues need to be sorted out since the APL2 is not >> > GPL-compatible. I don't know if it'd even be possible to distribute >> Aldor >> > as part of Sage. >> >> Yep, that is the key point, and I doubt that the licensing issue will be >> resolved any time soon. As far as I can tell from the discussions I have >> read >> on OpenAxiom-devel, the axiom mailing list and occasional posts by Bill >> Page >> related to the whole issue on sage-devel it seems unlikely that the >> license >> will chance any time soon. It was my impression that everybody wanted >> Aldor >> to be truly free, but that the copyright owners went another way. Hello Martin, Ralf, > I believe it would make *a lot of* sense to forward such "questions" to > the > people that are most likely to be able to correct them. At least some of > the > copyright owners seem to care about aldor being used, but I have the > impression > that they believe that the current license works alright. [sorry for the long rants in advance] Well, I assume the copyright holder is still NAG and they do have a bunch of lawyers that should be aware that the license they choose is GPL incompatible. Open sourcing projects half way or in name only doesn't serve anybody. Aldor is a specialized piece of software that seems to have its own niche, but it is far, far away from being main stream. So the combination of the half-assed license together with the vast number of truly free alternatives make it appear to *me personally* that Aldor will languish for a while longer, but it certainly isn't revitalized by the license change. To get back to your original point: I don't use Aldor and/or Axiom and because there are better, truly free alternatives out there it doesn't make a difference for *me personally* what happens to Aldor. It is a shame that NAG couldn't do the right thing, but know knows if there isn't some legal reason that prevents them from open sourcing it properly. Feel free to forward this to the "right" people, but I seriously doubt that it will have an impact. Aldor should have been freed *many years* ago to make an impact, but sprinkling the [pseudo] open source pixie dust on some dying piece of code doesn't magically ressurect it. Think of Mozilla: it took 3 years to get it in shape with a mass of volunteers and a lot of financial backing to become somewhat usable. And it barely made it in my opinion, if a real open alternative would have shown up in that timeframe it might have been doomed. Version 3 of firefox will be the first truly usable version of the gecko engine. The V2->V3 transition [I believe gecko 1.8->1.9] fixed *300* memory leaks - the main issue people have been complaining about for ages. I guess I made my point here. > > In case it helps: to *use* aldor-combinat, you actually do not necessarily > need > the aldor compiler. It is sufficient to have (some version of) axiom. Of > course, you do need the aldor compiler to build aldor-combinat. Ok, but no standard component of Sage will ever depend on a non-free tool chain to build, especially one that prohibits commercial activity. I read the Aldor license and one potential source of funding for Sage is support and that is clearly prohibited by Aldor's license. Another issue is that we do not want low level functionality to depend on pexpect interfaces, i.e. Robert Bradshaw rewrote some low level operation in Cython instead of using GAP and the speed-up was a factor of 4,500 [not a typo]. Since one can use Aldor via C this can be worked around on a technical level, but the licensing issue prevents us from doing so. We also want library interfaces and while that might be possible with FriCAS build on top of ecls that hasn't happened yet and as long as nobody actively writes and pushes the code nothing will happen. It would also mean that maxima needs to be ported to ecls since we will not have two lisp implementations in tree and that hasn't happened yet either, mainly because we lack technical expertise in that area and there are bigger fish to fry elsewhere. There is also the problem that we need to balance the increase in size with the increase in functionality and build time and including FriCAS and Aldor to get aldor-combinat seems like a bad trade off at the moment. Obviously that doens't mean that it can't become an optional spkg [like the openaxiom.spkg by Bill Page, maybe it should be integrated there], but the chances of some form of Axiom to become standard are slim. We are also pushing for Sage to become part of Debian and the Debian people really dislike non-free software. > Martin Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
