On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Minh Nguyen<nguyenmi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > We're currently shipping cvxopt 0.9 which is licensed under GPLv3+. > That is a standard spkg. My understanding is that code in the Sage > library should be GPL compatible with at least GPLv2. What about > licensing terms for standard spkg's? Can we accept a package whose > code is under GPLv3 or above? Here is what the file > SAGE_ROOT/COPYING.txt says: > > "Every component of Sage except jsmath is licensed under a GPL v2 (or > later) compatible license."
The way you're reading this isn't true since there are already several GPLv3 packages in Sage, including GSL, the GNUtls stuff, and maybe more (not sure). When that statement was written is was meant to say that every component of Sage is licensed under a license L such that L is GPLvx compatible for *some* x >= 2. You guys are interpreting this as x=2. I think the statement should be changed to the following, which is hopefully clearer: "Most components of Sage are licensed under a GPL version 3 compatible license. The only exception at present is jsmath, which is a javascript library run separately from Sage that is licensed under the Apache license." Regarding cvxopt, we should definitely upgrade the spkg. It's just a standard Python library, by the way (not pexpect). However, I'm suspect *nobody* uses it in Sage, given that we haven't upgraded it in I think well over a year and nobody has complained. Unless there are some emails from people reading this who disagree, I think this suggestion should be taken seriously. But that's orthogonal to preparing a new spkg, which we should do in any case. The issue as I remember it regarding GPLv3 versus GPLv2 for Sage is this: (1) legally there is absolutely no constraint to including GPLv3 code in Sage. (2) we want to retain the ability to produce a GPLv2-only version of Sage for anybody who wants one. With respect to cvxopt, which the rest of Sage doesn't currently use, upgrading to a new GPLv3 version doesn't impact either 1 or 2 above, since a GPLv2-only version of Sage could simply not include cvxopt. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
