On Jun 2, 1:20 am, rjf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi,
> It might be worth observing that the Department of Energy was happy to > supply DOE Macsyma to Bill Schelter or to anyone else (except Fidel > Castro) :) > on almost any terms, non-exclusively They gave Bill > permission to redistribute under GPL, because that was what Bill > requested. DOE did not ask for, or in my opinion even understand what > GPL meant. I think > they would be perfectly happy to turn it over to Microsoft, Maple, > Mathematica, or Sage as technology paid for by the government but now > available for commercial use. > > That was, of course, DOE Macsyma, and not sourceforge Maxima. > Could Sage use DOE Macsyma? I don't think anybody ever tried, but assuming the input and output of formatting were close [since the output is parsed by Sage] I would consider it possible. > For many files, the only change that Bill made was to insert his > copyright notice. > There were some real files contributed by Bill, including macro > definitions that papered over the > difference between Maclisp, definitely NOT common lisp, and GCL, > which is nearly common lisp. Thanks for the info. There was another email on the maxima list that mentioned that some files in the current Maxima version from sf had three GPL V2 only files. While this is ok for Sage as pointed out by William above that email didn't make it to the Maxima list yet [or maybe William removed the CC?], I am wondering of this really an issue with a program written in lisp. If one looks at clPython [which rjf mentioned on the Maxima mailing list a couple weeks ago] for example it is distributed under the LLGPL [notice the extra L] and at http://opensource.franz.com/preamble.html you can read: [quote] The concept of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 ("LGPL") has been adopted to govern the use and distribution of above- mentioned application. However, the LGPL uses terminology that is more appropriate for a program written in C than one written in Lisp. Nevertheless, the LGPL can still be applied to a Lisp program if certain clarifications are made. This document details those clarifications. Accordingly, the license for the open-source Lisp applications consists of this document plus the LGPL. Wherever there is a conflict between this document and the LGPL, this document takes precedence over the LGPL. [end quote] The main issue here is what constitutes derived work and while that is pretty clear for compiled C or C++ code [there are certainly areas of dispute there, too] since it involves linking. With lisp I tend to agree with the above that it is much harder since the GPL seemed to have been written with something like C or Fortran in mind. The problem similarly applies to other scripting languages like Python, but lisp seems somewhat special since it can be interpreted, run as bytecode or compiled depending on which [common] lisp implementation you use. > Maxima has many fixes and enhancements afterward, all presumably > compatible with some GPL. Whether this is OK for Sage or not, I do not > know. But it is unfortunate that RMS and FSF, has consumed the time of > so many people who are not lawyers. Yes, IANAL ought to be sprinkled into many discussions about licenses ;) 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
