On 8 Feb., 17:20, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Sage-Devel (and MPIR-devel), > > Recently, there have been baseless and unsubstantiated accusations > (e.g., on the GMP websitehttp://gmplib.org/) that LGPL v3+ licensed > GMP code is being used illegally in MPIR (which we ship with Sage) > under an LGPL v2+ license. A response is being formulated. > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org
Ah, well ... I'd like to slightly change the topic of this thread, away from GMP/ MPIR, towards the question whether Sage (more precisely: the Sage Library) is GPLv2 or GPLv3. As a specific example, take the files under "SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage-main/sage/modules/fg_pid/", e.g. the file "fgp_element.py". The copyright notice at the beginning says: #################################################################################### # Copyright (C) 2009 William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> # # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) # # This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU # General Public License for more details. # # The full text of the GPL is available at: # # http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ #################################################################################### Now on "http://www.gnu.org/licenses/"; you'll find three versions of the GPL; v1 is from 1989, v2 is from 1991, and v3 is from 2007. The last one currently is the "official" verison, i.e. currently "is" being "the GPL", and certainly was so during the whole of the year 2009 (the year the aforementioned file was created). Of course the file "COPYING.txt" in under "SAGE_ROOT" says, among other things: ... * ORIGINAL SAGE LIBRARY CODE: All original Sage code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. The full text of the GPL is available below in this file. Details of the licenses of the components of Sage are included below as well. ... I am not a lawyer, but personally, I do admit, that I would feel more comfortable, if that phrase from "COPYING.txt": "... either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version ..." would also be an explicit part of the copyright notices of at least the files newly added to the Sage Library, especially those created in 2008 or later. But it is missing in "fgp_element.py". There is a FAQ entry on "http://www.gnu.org/licenses/";, explaining the above phrase in more detail. Any thoughts? Cheers, Georg -- 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
