On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:57 AM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  Your question is equivalent to, "Do we want to allow people to charge
> money for running Sage, but not redistributing it?"

No, it isn't equivalent to that.   That is a different and interesting
question, but it is not equivalent.

>  I say, yes.  Imagine a private contractor who uses Sage.  Perhaps this person
>  modifies their version of Sage to include a proprietary algorithm.  Then, 
> they
> charge their clients for work done using Sage.  Obviously, they won't want to
>  give away the farm by distributing this copy.

If they do this and distribute the result just to their client then that's
fine.  It's all "in house".  That's allowed by the GPL.  If they distribute
the result to the "general public" that would violate the GPL.  Money
or not isn't relevant actually.

>  Running the notebook for any purpose is no different than using any
> other code in the distribution.  Go ahead and charge for it.

The question isn't whether this is legal or not under the GPL -- I think
it clearly is.  There is a variant of the GPL that David mentions that
specifically disallows this usage.    Since Sage is committed to being
GPLv2+ compatible (modulo the extremely annoying stuff from FSF
that is GPLv3 only right now, which I wish were not in Sage), we
should not seriously consider that variant of the GPL.

Even if we could, I think David is just generally curious about what
we as Sage developers want.  I think you've so far expressed your
opinion that you're fine with such usage of Sage.

I'll also go on record next to say that I'm fine with sombody using a modified
closed version of Sage plus the Sage notebook to run a public Sage
notebook website, and for them to not give back their improvements
if they do so.   I think it would be a shame for them to not mention
Sage or give us credit, and if they were to do so I would be
pissed off and would say so.  But I would not consider such a slight a
violation of
any law; it would just be "lame" but 100% legal.

>  On Mon, 5 May 2008, David Joyner wrote:
>
>  >
>  > Hi:
>  > I'm wondering if this is allowed under the GPL and if so, if that is
>  > what we want:
>  > Joe Shmoe installs SAGE on a webserver, renames it say to SmMATH, and
>  > charge a fee to anyone who wants to use it over the web. No indication that
>  > it is open source or free or anything. (Note: For example, Shmoe could
>  > be Wolfram.)
>  > I think the Affero license might cover this.
>  > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
>  > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
>  > Should the notebook code be relicensed? Note that AGPL is compatible with
>  > GPLv3 but not compatible with GPLv2.
>  > - David Joyner
>
>
>  >
>



-- 
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

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