What are all good GUI & plotting package options for Maxima?
Subject: What are all good GUI & plotting package options for Maxima?
From: Stavros Macrakis
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 11:15:05 -0500
SM> let's not write off gnuplot for license reasons just yet.
CY> If the gnuplot team were to up and quit, all we could do if
CY> I understand correctly would be to release patches against the
CY> last version....
If you read the *whole* gnuplot license, you'll see that it allows the
distribution of the unmodified release as well as patches to it. Users
*do not* need to get the base version from the gnuplot group directly.
So all that means is that you are not allowed to redistribute the
modified source by itself, only in the form <base version> + <patches>,
and there is no restriction on the scope or nature of the patches. For
CVS distribution, that is a no-op: CVS takes care of it for you. For
packaged releases (tar file or CD), it is a minor glitch. I really
can't see that this issue is a deal-breaker. The only issue I can see
here is that the delta possibly becomes very big in time, but so what?
Still, as I said, no matter what plotting package(s) we support, we
should keep our interface to them as clean and standard as possible.
-s