On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 8:15 AM, <ciri...@gmail.com> wrote: > I will add this: I'm a retired developer with 35+ years of writing > commercial software, and I will gladly give my time, effort, and expertise > to open source software so that enthusiasts, students, amateurs, teachers, > and many others can benefit from it. However if it ever gets to the point > where some person or company is making a significant amount of money from my > freely given efforts, I doubt very much I would continue. > > One of the reasons I chose Sage as a project I would contribute to is that, > besides my lifelong love of mathematics, I felt that most of the users of > this software would be individuals who weren't using it to make money. Maybe > I'm naive about that, but I don't think so. There's a lot of open source > projects out there that I wouldn't be part of simply because there are so > many companies using that software for their own profit. I suspect there are > a lot of open source contributors that feel the same way. > > -Bill
So there is no confusion, my top priority right now is to **make a lot of money** by building a profitable company on open source software (Latex, Linux, Sage, Octave, R, etc.), and use that money to fund: 1. Sage development, 2. Vastly improve the *documentation* ecosystem around Sage, 3. Vastly improve the *support* ecosystem around Sage, especially for the masses beyond elite research mathematicians. You may strongly disagree with this, or chose not to be involved in Sage (or LInux, say) as a result. But to be clear -- I'm not hiding this. -- William > > > On Wednesday, August 17, 2016 at 12:02:16 AM UTC-5, William wrote: >> >> >> http://ask.sagemath.org/question/34442/can-i-create-commercial-software-using-sagemath >> >> I put: "ANSWER: It depends on what you mean by "commercial software". >> >> ONE: If by "commercial software" you mean "closed source", then the >> answer is no, you can't write and publicly distribute such software >> legally. >> >> If you write a program that genuinely uses the Sage library in a >> nontrivial way, then that program is a derived work of Sage and must >> be distributed under the GPL (after all, there is no possible way to >> run the program without calling many functions in Sage). >> >> When I started Sage, I took PARI -- a GPL'd program -- and started >> building Sage on top of that. I was forced to GPL Sage because it was >> a derived work of PARI. It's the same principle at work. Sage is very >> much a LIBRARY, not just a programming language. >> >> We (Sage developers) also cannot sell or provide you with an >> exception, because Sage itself depends on many GPL'd programs that we >> do not own the copyright to. >> >> TWO: If by "commercial software" you mean software that makes money", >> then yes, it is possible to build commercial software on top of GPL'd >> software such as Sage. E.g., SageMathCloud is commercial (it makes >> money) but is GPL'd. The Linux operating system is also GPL'd but >> there are companies (like RedHat and Ubuntu) that make money from that >> software." >> >> >> -- >> 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. -- 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.
