On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Geoffrey Irving <irv...@naml.us> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Robert Bradshaw > <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Geoffrey Irving <irv...@naml.us> wrote: >>> Hello, >>> >>> I recently used sage to write a code generation script for exact >>> geometric predicates: >>> >>> https://github.com/otherlab/simplicity >>> >>> Since it's a python script that imports sage, the simplicity script is >>> GPL. >> >> Not automatically; often Sage is used more as an interpreter than a >> library: >> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL > > The opposite has been said in previous discussions on this mailing > list: like most GPL python libraries, including sage is amount to > linking against sage, which means the script doing the including must > be GPL. I'm fine with this situation.
The snippet you posted doesn't "link against" Sage anymore than Python. I don't hold with the philosophy that all Sage worksheets are automatically GPL. What about snippets of Sage code used as examples in published works? I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know not even the lawyers have hashed this out. >> That being said, the GPL only covers *distribution*. If indeed you >> built on Sage and wanted to release the resulting work, you would have >> to do so under the GPL (or a compatible license, and you could release >> it under other licences or public domain in addition to that). If you >> just want to use it on your own machine(s), or share it internally, >> there's no requirement to so license it. You can then do whatever you >> want with the output. (If the output contained significant portions of >> Sage itself, that would be a different story.) > > Code that can't be distributed essentially doesn't exist for my purposes. I didn't say you couldn't distribute it. Essentially, you have Sage (GPL) + script (no licence) -> output. As long as the output doesn't contain portions of Sage, it's your creation to distribute under whatever licence you want. As another data point, the GNU Bison project has an exception, but links in pure GPL libraries (iconv) that don't make mention of any exception. My hypothesis is that this is OK because the part of the source included in the output is part of Bison, not iconv. >> That being said, a runtime exemption could make a lot of sense, e.g. >> if we want to augment our fast_callable classes to spit out chunks of >> code in various languages. > > Okay. For now, it looks like the easiest way may be to port my code to sympy. That may be a fine thing to do, but it's sad when legal fluff does nothing but add busywork... - Robert -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support?hl=en.
