Teaching differential equations with Maxima

Dear Professor Fateman,

I am extremely grateful to you for your message below to me.
This has been a great honour to me since I am just a novice
in  Maxima and a non-expert user of it.

Taking the courage from your message below, with which I
COMPLETELY agree, I would like to ask you a  favour to me.

I am interested in differential equations for my courses and I
assume that there may be some DOE-Macsyma files missing from
the present distribution of Maxima and, possibly, the previous
distributions too. These files are required so that the ODE
command can work collaborating with the ODEAUX.MAC
file already present in the distribution of 5.9.0 rc4. I have
an idea about the names of these files.

Because of the description of the ODE command in the
DOE-Maxima Reference Manual (of Michael Clarkson),
in a great detail, I can assume that these files belong to
the pre-1982 era and, perhaps, their lack of inclusion in
Maxima is just an omission, which can be taken care of 
in a future release.

Your further help to me could include an advice about the
copyright status in such an omission case (pre-1982)
DOE-Macsyma files and, possibly, inclusion of these
files, just in the Maxima language I mean, to the next
Maxima distributions after your suggestion (in some
separate directory). For the future, some of your 
collaborators might undertake the task to translate
them to GNU-Lisp, but the Maxima language code 
may be sufficient for the moment so that I can proceed.

Analogous (but more difficult) seems to be the case with
the PARAMPLOT2 command of DOE-Macsyma also
present in DOE-Macsyma, but now not present in
Maxima. This is also of great interest to me.

Any help of you to me will be crucial for me in my
teaching duties at the University of Patras.

Of course, with the help of colleagues, I will also try to f
ind additional commands and packages of interest to me 
and your commentsbelow are very enlightening in such 
situations.

Naturally, please accept my sincere apologies for
any wrong comments by me simply due to my
inexperience with Maxima and Copyright matters too.
My wish is to respect Copyright signs and not to 
proceed to incorrect comments.

I have also sent (before half an hour) a reply to Stavros 
Macrakis with communication to the Maxima Mailing 
List. This should have also reached you.

Please, accept again my gratitude for your precious
help and support. Now I am going on to the second 
semester of my using Maxima at our University of Patras
in my courses. I have also proceeded to a CD-ROM
distribution (of 5.5 beta and related GPL material to
my students).

With my kindest personal regards from Patras,

Nikos

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Fateman" <fateman at cs>
To: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>
Cc: "Wolfgang Jenkner" <wjenkner@inode.at>; <maxima@mail.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] Teaching differential equations with Maxima


> From the file "readme.now"..
> ftp://ftp.mines.colorado.edu/pub/papers/math_cs_dept/software/readme.now
> 
> You are welcome to use any of the software packages free of charge 
> for scientific work, with acknowledgement of the developers and proper 
> reference to either our research papers or to the software, or to both.
> 
> The software may not be reproduced or sold without written consent 
> of the authors (Copyright 1995-2002).
> 
> ...........
> 
> So don't sell it, and don't use it for UNscientific work.  It is pretty 
> clear that it
> is not owned by Macsyma Inc.  My guess is that you could pretty much
> indefinitely expect the software to be available on the internet, even 
> if you
> didn't make a local copy. But you might email the authors to see if it
> could be put into sourceforge.
> RJF