On 02/11/12 02:57 PM, Jason Grout wrote:
On 2/11/12 8:52 AM, Jonathan wrote:
What is the policy on system dependencies?

Here is the situation. The latest flask-notebook contains support for
OpenSSL. In order to compile properly it needs access to both the
openssl and openssl-dev packages. At least on my Ubuntu system the
openssl package is standard, but openssl-dev is not. When the flask-
notebook is incorporated, do we need to add the openssl package to the
compilation dependencies in the Sage readme, or does the flask
notebook spkg need to include or build those dependencies?

My understanding is that the flask notebook cannot include the openssl
headers because of licensing incompatibilities.

So I'd support adding openssl-dev as a requirement of Sage. What systems
does it come default on? I don't recall having a problem on OSX, for
example.

Jason

Does that get around the licensing issues? I'm not convinced it does myself.

If you make it a requirement to use non-GPL code, which is not part of the core of the operating system to run Sage, then I don't see how Sage can be considered GPL any more.

What do you do if a system has the OpenSSL libraries, but they are too old? Or if it has the libraries, but not the development headers? Someone has already said the development headers don't come with Ubuntu.

Perhaps you can argue you don't actually link to the headers, so that is ok. All seems a bit doggy to me.

I believe the license of Sage is very dubious at best, even in it's current state. Unfortunately, the huge number of different "open source" licenses seems to make this almost inevitable.

Has anyone ever tried getting the OpenSSL developers to release OpenSSL under a GPL license, or perhaps dual license it, giving anyone the choice to use whatever license they want.

Would you consider Sage GPL if it needed to link to libraries written by Wolfram Research for Mathematica?

Dave

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