You are always going to be welcome. I always feel like a Johnny come lately with regard to Sage, even though I started contributing to Sage with my qsieve about 2.5 years ago. In contrast, you were there, right in the guts of the thing, right from the start! Your contribution has always been, and I am certain always will be viewed as vital.
I'm sorry for making you feel depressed. I applaud your efforts, which have been going on for some time now, to engage in shuttle diplomacy. But even if there weren't personality issues involved, there is no clear path towards reconciling the two projects. It's not even clear what we *could* do, even if we were willing to. The philosophies behind the two projects are just too different. For now, as far as I can tell, things just have to be this way. At the worst, there will be some duplicated effort, and both projects will be pushed to produce better, faster, more impressive code than they otherwise would have. That will benefit everyone. My original intention when I realised that TG wasn't going to entertain changing the license is that Torbjorn and I could reach some kind of code sharing agreement. But that is tantamount to asking him to relicense everything LGPL v2+ and for us to assign our copyright to FSF. As noble as the intention may be, there simply isn't any way around that. So, whilst I do applaud and thank you for your efforts in the diplomacy, I think it can't lead anywhere productive for now. Perhaps one day FSF will totally deprecate LGPL and introduce a GPL v4. Perhaps this will please everyone, both projects will switch (that would be an option right, as we both use + in our licenses) and everything will be rosy again. Who knows, perhaps in our old age, I'll invite TG to my place for a beer and we'll laugh about the current misunderstandings. In the mean time, I do think you have a mandate to give Sage users an option to use GMP, and people seem to want that. You and TG should both be pleased with that vote of confidence. But in terms of strategic directions for Sage, MPIR fits into that much better than GMP does at present, IMO. I am sure if MPIR doesn't deliver for people, then that will be reappraised. Bill. On 22 Apr, 14:22, David Harvey <dmhar...@cims.nyu.edu> wrote: > Oh look, I've been involved in Sage since mid-2006. This is the first > major strategic decision with which I've disagreed so strongly, and > the first time I've felt truly unwelcome on this list. It's quite > depressing. > > I sincerely believe the costs of the fork to the community outweigh > the benefits. > > Probably no-one will believe me, but this whole kerfuffle started as a > result of me trying some shuttle diplomacy to get the two projects > talking. The personal animosities involved are quite astonishing. > > Hopefully my planned career as a mathematician will be more successful > than my career as a diplomat. > > Anyway, forget it. Good luck with MPIR guys. > > david --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
