On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 10:58 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> As to GPL vs BSD, I am sad that some people will not contribute to a >> BSD project and some other people will not use a GPL project. But my >> intuition says that the license is not the main reason. If sympy was >> as fast as ginac (as I hope it will be in not so distant future), I am >> sure it'd be ok, even if it's BSD. BTW, I told Burcin and William that >> if the license was the only reason, I am willing to consider switching >> to GPL (i.e. try to persuade all 44+ contributors), if that would mean >> more people would be developing sympy. Currently it seems to be the >> opposite, i.e. when we switched from GPL to BSD, people and developers >> seemed to like it, but I may well be mistaken. But as I said, I think >> the main problem of sympy is not the license, but speed. > > The GPL/BSD split in the mathematical Python community is > unfortunate and a is very real problem. At scipy'08 it was > the source of tension for some people... I don't know if for this particular project it's a realistic/valid/interesting solution or not, but how about using LGPL as a middle solution? I happen to actually really like the LGPL: I find that it protects my code from flat out abuse, while not imposing my conditions beyond my own code boundaries. But for many cases I find that LGPL strikes an excellent balance and fully protects the original code from closed modifications (though not from use as an unmodified library), which is what I consider most important. In fact, I'd originally licensed ipython as LGPL, and switched to BSD only to make it easier to share code back and forth with numpy/scipy/matplotlib. In this case I'm happy having switched to BSD, but I still like the LGPL a lot. Just a suggestion to consider, though obviously ultimately the decision rests with the code authors. Cheers, f ps - I find the pynac idea extremely cool: using python itself as the rich native support for a C/C++ library in replacement of another heavyweight system (CLN in this case) is a great show of the utility and quality of the language. FWIW I'm +1 on it going in, though I'm not really a sage developer myself. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
