Hi Jan: 1. I am not a lawyer. If you need legal advice, find a lawyer.
2. I expect that you would be threatened first, rather than sued. Before you respond at all to any correspondence from WRI, find a lawyer. 3. I believe a lawyer would advise you that anything you say can be used against you, even stuff you write here, or any "explanations" you might be tempted to make. Arguing legal precedent etc. with a WRI lawyer is not a good idea. The more you write the worse you make your case. Lawyers are not judges. They represent their clients. They will not say to you, "Oh, you are right about Borland". 4. I expect that the status (free / open) of your software is quite irrelevant to its infringement (or not). 5. Mathics is not the first free Mathematica-compatible parser, though it looks to be more complete and up-to-date than MockMMA. Someone took my MockMMA and released a subset of it as a front-end to Maxima. http://mockmma.sourceforge.net/ This sourceforge MockMMA appears to have is ignored all parts of Mathematica that do not have a direct translation into Maxima (e.g. pattern-matching!). This fork appears to be substantially less effective in mimicking Mathematica than my MockMMA which in turn is less effective than your Mathics. My MockMMA does not really attempt to do so much of the internal algorithm stuff, but does bits and pieces of interest to me at the time. bignums, polynomial arithmetic, differentiation, some integration. I think your pattern matching and evaluation is more thorough. What Mathics could do is call Maxima instead of sympy; right now if Mathics called Sage, then Sage would call Maxima for some things. This violates the premise that "the world is python" but of course that's not my premise. Probably you (or someone) could bundle Mathics with Maxima on sourceforge. > > 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. Um, it also executed it. It was also a Mathematica-syntax front end to all of Common Lisp, and hence the Mathematica part was, at least in principle, a small part. > I'm not sure if Richard wrote back to them, or just > ignored them, but his code is still around. They wrote to me first. I can't think of any scenario in which they would want to give you, preemptively, permission to go ahead. Getting free legal advice is worth what you paid for it :( RJF -- 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
