That blog said "the symbolic math software community has been burned in the past by people profiting from proprietary extensions of BSD code without attribution or contribution."
(the blogger said the Sage people say this). I don't know if this claim originated at Sage, or if Sage people believe it. If they believe it, I would be interested in learning of a single example of someone who was burned. Indeed, I would be interested in examples of people profiting from symbolic software (using it, not selling it like Maple and Mathematica)! As one of the authors of Macsyma, I know that the eventual disposition of the academically-developed software had nothing to do with BSD vs GPL. It was that MIT sought to profit from selling the software that it owned. Eventually, through a succession of not very profitable proprietary activities, (during which attribution was always maintained), the software skidded to a halt. Only the earlier "DOE Macsyma" sort-of-open release has been available recently. Another major symbolic system, Axiom, was initially sold by IBM, then NAG, and was released as BSD code. In any case, the idea that someone should be "burned" by another person using what was freely given away, makes no sense. RJF ps. It seems to me that 99% of the discussion of GPL "on the internet" is ill-informed, naive, repetitive, pointless or all of the above. On Jul 14, 5:30 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Ondrej Certik<ond...@certik.cz> wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Pablo De Napoli<pden...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> I have left the following comment on the blog... > > >> "However, the GPL means that people cannot realistically use SAGE in a > >> commercial tool, either as a platform/runtime, or as an embedded > >> component." > > >> What it is the justification for this claim? Why wouldn't the GPL > >> allow one to use SAGE as a "commercial tool"? > >> I think that a GPL program like Sage might well have commercial > >> applications. For instance: you could use Sage for modelling an > >> industrial process. There is nothing in the GPL against that. > > Yes, that comment does seem a little off. E.g., people use Linux as a > commercial tool, platform, and embedded component in commercial > products all the time. > > Anyway, I just posted the following on that blog, which was about the > whole paragraph, which I thought wasn't quite on target. I > unfortunately made a statement about NZMATH that isn't so nice, but > the fact is that it is the perfect example to illustrate why GPL is a > vastly better choice of license for the Sage project than BSD. (Short > answer -- because we get to work with the GAP, Singular, maxima, and > PARI projects because we use the GPL license. If we used BSD we > couldn't. Working with Gap/Singular/Maxima/PARI rocks.) > > I'm the director of the Sage project, and I would like to clarify a > possible misconception that the following statement you made might > suggest: "SAGE, an open-source Pythonic replacement for > Maple/Mathematica/Magma/Matlab, is another very successful project, > but they staunchly use the GPL. Their reasoning is much like Zed’s, > because the symbolic math software community has been burned in the > past by people profiting from proprietary extensions of BSD code > without attribution or contribution. However, the GPL means that > people cannot realistically use SAGE in a commercial tool, either as a > platform/runtime, or as an embedded component. The SAGE authors have, > presumably, weighed the trade-offs and decided it’s ultimately more > valuable to be protected than to have the contributions of that > segment of developers." > > This gives us far too much credit. In fact, the Sage project uses the > GPL because every single one of the major symbolic mathematics > programs that Sage builds upon -- Maxima, Singular, PARI, NTL, and > GAP -- chose to use the GPL (not LGPL) back in the 1990s. If it > weren't for Sage building on those projects (and their amazing > communities!), Sage's capabilities would still be quite small in > comparison to Mathematica, Maple, and Magma. Sage uses the GPL > because we have no choice but to use the GPL. > > There is a Python project called NZMATH that was started at the same > time as Sage, is BSD licensed, and original had exactly the same goals > as Sage. It continues to be excellent evidence that Sage would not > succeed without building on the great work of the GAP, Singular, PARI, > and Maxima projects. Seehttp://tnt.math.metro-u.ac.jp/nzmath/. > > That said, I can understand why you wrote what you wrote above about > why the Sage project uses the GPL. It was because of a discussion > you, me, and several other people had at Enthought back in 2007, and I > don't want to say that your point is invalid. It's just that the > situation is really much more complicated than your statement would > suggest. And I was really tired when we had that discussion. Also, > you might recall that I committed to BSD license key parts of the Sage > notebook as a result of that conversation (I can do this since the > notebook is totally independent of that mathematics code mentioned > above). > > -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
