--- Martin RUBEY <rubey@labri.fr> wrote:
> Does anybody have any ideas how a cooperation could look like? I feel
> it's a shame that we don't have access to the bugfixes incorporated
> in the commercial version, nor to their buglist...
Agreed, particularly the bug list, but I don't think there is much we
can do about it. I doubt a cooperation is likely - my sense is that
the owner wishes Macsyma to remain a commercial project. If such is the
case, helping the open source version won't benefit him much.
On a related, and possibly more promising note, are there any employees
still on the net who could give us a summary of what they had to do? I
don't know what they can and can't say, but presumably they could at
least sketch the problem spots.
> On the other hand, the answer sounds rather strange to me: Why does
> he state he's not able to generate a key for the unix version? What
> does this mean: he has no Linux version? I thought the source would
> be more or less the same - save the front-end, maybe...
Probably it is. I'm guessing that he has copies of the commercial CD
and a key generator for Windows, and that's it. Apparently the key
system was different between Unix and Windows. Presumably if they ever
fish the servers out they could find the other parts, but considering
the info about Macsyma isn't up on the website yet I'm guessing it's
not really a priority...
> I'm not sure what we have to offer, but maybe somebody has ideas...
I don't think we can offer much of anything that would interest a
commercial project.
> (at least we can offer that we keep the community going)
Since we do that anyway, without them giving up a thing, I suspect that
won't carry much weight. Nor do I think we should worry about it too
much - we can and will do just fine on our own. The bug list would be
nice, but it's not worth losing sleep over.
I think the evolution will be that Maxima will continue to catch up to
the commercial Macsyma for quite a while, but eventually we will be
close enough to it (assuming it remains a static target) that the
advantage of the commercial code starts to fade away. How long that
will be I have no idea, but I think it's safe to say that Macsyma won't
remain a viable commercial product forever unless some sort of ongoing
development starts taking place again.
CY
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