On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 8:51 AM, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Jun 1, 5:30 pm, Robert Dodier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. >> >> Jaap Spies wrote: >> > See at the end of: >> >> >http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/2008/011842.html >> > > Hi Robert, > >> I don't know what is at stake here from the perspective of Sage, >> but so far as I know the current developers of Maxima are not >> in a position to change the license by their own agreement. >> >> The code base from which the current developers are working >> was released by Bill Schelter under terms of the GNU GPL v2. >> (To the best of my knowledge, Schelter never referred to later >> versions of the license.) > > On a general note: If the license on even one file of Maxima source > code is currently GPL V2 [only] you cannot relicense the whole work > under GPL V3 or later since GPL V2 and GPL V3+ are incompatible. If > Bill Schelter did use GPL V2 only this will likely apply to a large > portion of the Maxima code base. > > Another problem is that since Maxima is written in common lisp and > therefore can be run in interpreted mode, i.e. there is no compilation > or linking involved in that case. Interestingly enough there is a > provision in the clPython license [which is licensed under LLGPL - see > "License Terms" at http://opensource.franz.com/ ], so somebody at > Franz looked at the LGPL and came to the conclusion that for a > [potentially] interpreted language there is a problem with the concept > of derived work here. > > The same applies to code written in Sage on the Python level since > there is also no compilation and hence no linking going on. > >> Unfortunately Schelter died in 2001. >> To change the license to anything else, it seems necessary to >> get approval from Schelter's heirs. > > Yes, since he died this is certainly a problem. IANAL, so I don't know > if his estate could make those license changes, but it sounds > plausible that they could. Note that maybe the DoE [or was it the DoD] > as the original copyright holder of the Maxima source code may have > imposed that Maxima would be GPL V2 only, but that is pure speculation > from my end.
I really hope Maxima is not GPL V2 only, since: (1) that would mean we couldn't distribute it with Sage, (2) that would mean that we messed up when we did our last license audit. In fact looking through the actual source code, it mostly says "Copyright William F. Schelter" or "See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License." The top level of the maxima distribution contains the standard GPLv2 license file, which is "GPLv2+", since it contains the phrase "If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation." If anybody is a lawyer, please clarify, since IANAL. -- 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
