> From: <michel.lavaud at univ-orleans> wrote:
> OK, maybe you are right. I have removed the translation and the
> English/french installer for Windows from my web site and ftp site, until
> the situation is clarified. And all my apologizes to everybody on this
> list for having been the cause for so many pointless messages.
Dear Michel,
Dear Colleagues,
Naturally, I am very disappointed from the above outcome of my
intervention, but I compleletly repect your views not to accept
COPYING1 in your and your collaborators' so careful and useful
work with the French translation of the Maxima Manual and the
Windows installer. Of course, I do not like COPYING1 to be
present, especially in an international environment, but this has
been a term by D.O.E. to William F. Schelter and, therefore,
to us as well. I believe this restriction by D.O.E. is dictated by
some concrete U.S. law (or something equivalent I mean they
had to respect) and they had no alternative in their licence to
William F. Schelter for DOE-Macsyma under the validity of
this assumed law (or equivalent).
Therefore, I believe that with the help of James and other
colleagues too this situation will be clarified very soon so
that you can distribute your so excellent French work on
Maxima without having to accept COPYING1 and its export
restrictions.
By no means do I wish to intervene in your decision about your
intellectual work with Maxima, which I completely respect, but
practically speaking, since D.O.E. essentially permits the
distribution of Maxima through the internet and, moreover,
the number of countries with export restrictions seems to be
very small, the practical consequence of COPYING1 is really
small too.
This has been essentially already pointed out by Richard.
Finally, please, permit me to express my view about what had
happened in the past with the University of Texas distribution
by William F. Schelter (after an agreement with D.O.E. I assume,
the responsible Department I mean ). Everybody had the right
to download Maxima (or DOE-Macsyma, there is a confusion)
from the University of Texas FTP server and after this action one
had to pay D.O.E. before installing it (an amount of the order of
100 or 150 U.S. $, much less than that of the commercial
Macsyma, perhaps less than that of DOE-Macsyma from
D.O.E.) without this payment being accompanied by a password
or something equivalent, but necessary for actually using Maxima.
Am I right in this view or wrong? After the official permission
by D.O.E. to William F. Schelter to prepare derivative works
(under COPYING1) the situation became much more mild
and now nobody is obliged to pay D.O.E. for Maxima (after
downloading) unless he wishes to have available DOE-
Macsyma itself. Then he has to proceed to an official order
and he will receive the DOE-Macsyma package after payment
in advance.
Could some colleague, please, confirm or deny my above view
about the way of distribution of Maxima or DOE-Macsyma
(I am not sure) by William F. Schelter before the permission
to him by D.O.E. in October 1998 to distribute derivative
works of DOE-Macyma under GPL (or another licence at his
discretion) plus COPYING1? I am really curious on this point
of the history of Maxima, which is not clarified very well in the
Maxima Book and seems to be in some discrepancy with what
I had read in Internet sources about Macsyma, DOE-Macsyma
and Maxima distributions.
Many sincere thanks in advance!
Best regards from Patras,
Nikos