Dear Richard,
Many most sincere thanks for all of your valuable comments
on Maxima and its distribution.
I can just add that meanwhile I found one of the web pages I
had consulted about the distribution of Maxima. This is:
http://www.starlink.rl.ac.uk/star/docs/sgp47.htx/node18.html
and contains a description of the distribution approach valid
at the time this page had been prepared.
> "Richard Fateman" <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I would guess that few if any people bothered to send DOE anything.
> This payment originated as a fee to get a copy of the tape from DOE.
> In 1982 they would actually send a magnetic tape of the source code.
> Since DOE costs for the net download are zero, the justification
> for the fee is mostly gone.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that D.O.E. finally accepted to
give the permission for the preparation of derivative works to
William F. Schelter.
> The distinction you make between Maxima and DOE-Macsyma is
> negligible.
Yes, I agree, but the differences include the code of the ODE
command (perhaps about 5% of the whole code of M.I.T. Macsyma,
almost one out of seven diskettes of the 1994 commercial Macsyma
distribution) and one or two important graphics commands as far
as I remember.
Please, accept again my most sincere thanks again for your prompt
reply and clarifications, which are greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Nikos