On 2 April 2012 21:10, Jan Pöschko <jan.poesc...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am quite aware of the potential risk of being sued, but still I don't know > what to do about it. Isn't this a general problem when creating (free) > software? The patent you mentioned could easily be applied to Sage as well – > so how do you deal with that there?
Try to get it hosted somewhere like Nigeria. > Should I contact Wolfram and explicitly ask whether they're "okay" with > Mathics? I would not, as you can be sure they would say "no". They tried this with Richard Fateman, who produced a lisp program which took some Mathematica input. I'm not sure if Richard wrote back to them, or just ignored them, but his code is still around. > Could I trust a "yes" and should I just accept a "no"? Given that > I'm not a legal expert and don't have the money to hire one, should I rather > take down Mathily to avoid any risks? Well, since it's GPL, you could always take it down, and someone else will get it hosted somewhere like Nigeria. Somehow I don't think they would bother trying to stop that! There are many countries where software piracy is very common, and in such a country Wolfram Research would not waste their time trying to pursue anyone hosting a web site with your code. They might in the USA, Europe and a few others places, but there are vast areas of the world where their lawyers would know they would be wasting their time. My attitude would be: 1) Host it as you do now. 2) If they moan, point out the Borland/Lotus case, and ask how they think your situation is materially different from that, which was settled in the Supreme Court in favor of Borland, who made a clone of Lotus 123. 3) If they look to get more serious, agree to take it down. Someone woud bound to get it hosted in a country where WRI would not waste their time. Dave -- 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
