On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:29 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Robert Bradshaw > <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: >> What about >> publishing (collections of) worksheets under the CC license? Code >> snippets in books? Are your books GPL compatible? (Maybe you could >> claim fair use.) >> >> I have no trouble licensing code under the GPL, but I do think this >> places an onerous and inappropriate burden on all *users* of Sage, >> and the GPL is supposed to be about modifying/distributing code. > > Building software on top of GPL'd libraries like Sage *does* have > serious implications toward sharing. That's sort of the point of the > GPL'd. There's no sense in hiding that.
At this point in the thread I'd argue that we don't really have a clue on what would be a court interpretation of the GPL on this issue [ok, each one of us has a clue, but the clues we have disagree :) in fact we don't even know if different courts would agree on this]. But IMO this particular issue is rather important and it deserves a definition, at the very least in the form of an express intent by the Sage developers, or even a clarification in the license itself. Thus, the really important question is not what the GPL means, or implies, but what *should* it mean, in order to better achieve the goals of Sage and of Sage developers, and what the Sage developers *intent* is. I think it is better if we differentiate two "levels" of program: (A) the "sage system", i.e. the core sage library and all the packages included in sage, etc. (B) the user scripts written independently of the sage system, which may depend on facilities provided by the documented APIs, etc. There is of course a gray area between (A) and (B), because a user script may (ab)use of Sage internals in a significative way, etc, and in the end it becomes a part of (A). For instance, it definitely would be unfair if somebody extended functionality on some area of Sage by exporting all the internals and adding on top of that in a non-GPLed user script. ---- So, here's a question for Sage developers: For user scripts clearly in (B), i.e. scripts which just *use* sage in the intended ways of use, etc. (1) do you think it is a good idea to require the scripts to be published under GPL or not published at all? (2) was this your actual intent when you contributed code to Sage under the GPL? I'm particularly interested in your (William) answer to this. In some of your posts seemed as if you were claiming that requiring scripts to be published under the GPL is the only option (just by the FSF interpretation of the issue), but I don't know what was your original intent, and whether you think this is good or just an undesired side effect of the GPL. Gonzalo --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
