Teaching differential equations with Maxima

Dear Stavros,

I am thankful again to you for your help and support and certainly
I am also thankful to Wolfgang for the precious information having
been brought to my attention. My brief reply has as follows.

In general, I completely agree with almost all of your comments
below and your suggestion that a registry of Maxima-compatible
software is perfect, I applaud it. It is also certain that we have to
come into contact with the copyright owners of each package and,
most probably, we will get a permission to distribute it with Maxima
in a future release and after some stabilization. Jim has serious
objections to be in a hurry in such matters (a reply by him to
Cliff in a similar situation before few months).

Of course, for GPL software such as Maxima, I can ignore everbody
and proceed to distributions of additional files myself outside the
official Maxima. This I already did in one or two cases of files, but
generally speaking, I prefer to leave this task to your group of
developers of Maxima, particularly since I am a novice and non-
expert in Maxima leaving outside U.S.A. This is wise for me in
my way of thinking. (I repeat you are generally right in your
comments, but I wish to be safe from copyright matters.)

With my recent messages I have tried to bring the attention and
the interest of the colleagues on this situation: that of enriching
Maxima with new packages as soon as this will become possible.
In case of failure, I may undertake myself the task to come into
contact with the authors of the packages under question and
additional packages perhaps reaching up to the point to write
to the owner of the old Macsyma Inc. (I have forgotten his
name. Could you remind it to me?) and try to get permissions
for use and distribution at least to my students. Yet, I believe
that this should happen gradually by the interested colleagues
(such as you) and, perhaps, me too after the consent of Jim as
far as the inclusion of such packages to Maxima is concerned.

On the other hand (you read the Maxima mailing list) perhaps
a point of precedence for me now is to bring back to Maxima
files and commands already present in DOE-Maxima and
described in detail in the DOE-Maxima Reference Manual
of Mike and, probably, in the Maxima Referene Manual. This I
try to do as you understand and it is a very simple task since many
colleagues have the files available through the distributions of
DOE Maxima in the past and what is needed is that these
can be added in the distribution (in the Maxima language I
mean). Such a simple task! (I do not know about copyright
matters with respect to DOE-Maxima.)

In any case, your help is and will be appreciated and thanks to
the help of Professor Fateman and Dr. Amundson and the
colleagues in the Development Team of Maxima these points
can be considerably improved in the near future.

Concluding:

(i) I generally agree with your comments, you are right, I
applaud them, but we must always be careful with copyright
matters.

(ii) I would like not to be involved too much in the inclusion
of additional packages to Maxima, leaving this task to the
Development Team of Maxima.

(iii) Surely, your idea about a registry of Maxima packages
is perfect and should be implemented. Distribution licenses
should also be obtained for non-GPL and related packages
and this is easy for non-commercial Macsyma packages.
For commercial Macsyma packages (after 1982 and with
a copyright sign by Symbolics/Macsyma Inc.), we should
have the permission of the present owner. I do not recall a
serious attempt to come into contact with him although his
name is known.

(iii) For the moment, I would be interested that the existing
DOE-Maxima files (before 1982 I mean) be present in the
distribution of Maxima so that I can use them, perhaps not
in the share library somewhere else. This is an extremely
easy task, but I cannot do it myself since I do not have
accessibility to the files. To this task I have implicitly
requested the help of the colleagues.

(iv) I would be glad to help you and the colleagues to the
extent of my possibilities and time if I could contribute a
little to the extension of Maxima by new commands and
packages, but, I am afraid this practically speaking,
exceeds my possibilities.

I am always thankful to you for your so kind help and support.

I hope that under the above explanations by me you will
agree that our opinions are not very different.

Naturally, I am mainly interested for my own courses in
Patras, but any help to me may prove useful to other
colleagues too in the future.

Many thanks and best regards from Patras,

Nikos


----- Original Message -----
From: "Stavros Macrakis" <stavros.macrakis at verizon>
To: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>; "Wolfgang Jenkner"
<wjenkner@inode.at>
Cc: <maxima@mail.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 4:27 PM
Subject: RE: [Maxima] Teaching differential equations with Maxima (sorry for
incomplete Send)


> > > those packages were written for the commercial Macsyma...
> > disappointing for me since it forbids me to distribute these
> > files to my students, since they belong to the commercial
> > Macsyma.
>
> Niko, I think you are confusing two meanings of the word "for".  I
> believe Wolfgang meant that the packages were written to be compatible
> with commercial Macsyma, because they were developed by users of
> commercial Macsyma.  I do not believe he means that they were written
> for the account of Macsyma Inc (although that may be the case for some
> of them).
>
> Just because something was written "for" the commercial Macsyma does not
> mean that it is part of commercial Macsyma.  There are many packages
> that were written "for" Macsyma by people outside Macsyma, Inc, which
> never belonged to Macsyma, Inc, and which cannot be restricted by
> Macsyma Inc licenses.
>
> So we need to look at the situation in more detail.
>
> Those files which do have Macsyma Inc copyright notices can be presumed
> to have license restrictions.  However, some of them may have been
> originally contributed to Macsyma by outside developers, who retain
> their own rights.  The Share directories of Maxima/Macsyma contain many
> contributed programs, which we might be able to get permission to use.
>
> Some files have non-Macsyma Inc copyright notices.  We can try
> contacting the authors for permission.  For example, symmgrp.max is
> apparently copyrighted by P. Winternitz and colleagues at the Université
> de Montréal -- though the copyright notice is flawed (it includes a date
> but not a copyright holder).  It should be possible to contact them.
>
> And some files have no copyright notices.  Though they may still be
> copyrighted under current law, I think it is both legal and ethical to
> use them, since they are posted in public places, unless and until the
> copyright owner asks us to stop.
>
> Perhaps we need to establish some sort of registry of Maxima-compatible
> software where we can keep track of who wrote what and what the license
> conditions are.
>
>      -s