On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 12:22 AM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Friday, May 27, 2016 at 10:34:38 AM UTC-7, William wrote: >> >> On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 10:30 AM, rjf <fat...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > So you should claim authorship and copyright, and then declare that >> > others >> > may >> > use it under whatever restrictions you determine. Personally, I find >> > the >> > MIT or >> > Berkeley licenses much better than GPL, since they let anyone use the >> > code >> > for any purpose and don't insist on other conditions. >> >> Curious: I always imagined that you were the main force behind the >> open sourcing of Maxima. Why is the Maxima license GPL instead of MIT >> or Berkeley? > > > I was the main force in making the Macsyma code available via the Dept. of > Energy > (a principal, but not sole, sponsor of the Macsyma project at MIT.) The > powers > at MIT, including my de facto advisor, Joel Moses, wished to take advantage > of a > gov't rule that gave the academic institution ownership rights to software > developed > under gov't sponsorship. Through a somewhat convoluted process this > resulted > in the sale of exclusive commercial rights to Macsyma to Symbolics Inc. > In retrospect I think everyone would concede this was a bad idea. I forced > MIT to > put a copy officially in the Dept of Energy software library; they put a > broken copy > there. I fixed it up to run "out of the box" on DEC VAX computers running > Berkeley UNIX (or, with some help, VAX/VMS). It was not yet free because > DOE > charged a few hundred dollars, and as a concession to MIT did not allow > redistribution. > This version used Franz Lisp which we wrote at Berkeley. Franz Lisp was > free/open > part of Berkeley UNIX. > Bill Schelter modified the Macsyma code and added extra pieces and got it > running > under Kyoto Common Lisp (which he changed and named Austin-Kyoto Common > Lisp) > and then became GCL. > > Bill also conferred with DOE and asked for permission to release DOE-Macsyma > under > GPL. At that time DOE was, I think, giving up on their library business, > and so agreed. > > I think they would have equally well released it under BSD or MIT open > source license > if Bill had asked for that. I read the permission letter as a "whatever" > permission. > > I had some discussion about the appropriateness of GPL, but Bill's untimely > death cut > that off.
Thanks for sharing the above/below history! > Side effect: There is no commercial support for it; > at least to my knowledge, not a single person has > earned a single penny "selling" Macsyma or services, or add-ons. SageMath, Inc., sells use of Sage (via https://cloud.sagemath.com), and Sage significantly uses Maxima. SageMathCloud also has a notebook that can be used in Maxima mode. Also, SageMath, Inc. provides commercial support to users. SageMath, Inc. has earned at least a single penny in revenue. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
