[Fwd: Re: GCL used commercially] (repeat of response to Tim)

-------- Original Message --------


To: Tim Daly <daly@rio.sci.ccny.cuny.edu>, ...
Thanks for the info! I guess I was mistaken in thinking Bill
was not concerned with the details of the legal issues.


If Bill rewrote GCL from the ground up, that would explain
the change in license terms.

RJF

PS, this was not sent to the maxima mailing list.. are the
relevant people cc'd by virtue of one of the other lists?

PPS
As a rough cut, my guess is that at a relatively lean company
$100,000 would be divided this way:

$50k salary
$10k maintenance of computer system for that person
       (hardware, software, staff, upgrades)
$30k health, retirement, soc. sec. benefits
$10k company admin. (secretarial, accounting, office rental, phone..)

Your $50k would then be taxed, of course.



Tim Daly wrote:
 > Richard[s],
 >
 > I was the Axiom (nee Scratchpad) developer at IBM Research who worked
 > with Bill Schelter on AKCL. At the time AKCL was licensed first from
 > Kyoto thru Yuasa and Hagiya. Bill had an agreement that allowed him
 > to make changes atop the original (KCL). He built a mechanism that
 > merged the original with his own version of patch to construct AKCL.
 > IBM, in order to distribute Scratchpad, had a license with both the
 > KCL group and Schelter and had permission to distribute Scratchpad
 > with AKCL. I was part of those discussions.
 >
 > At the time my efforts involved porting Scratchpad from MacLisp and
 > Lisp/VM to Common Lisp. Scratchpad eventually ran on any Common Lisp
 > including Symbolics, Golden Common Lisp, Lucid, Franz, AKCL, CMUCL
 > (Spice, actually, which later morphed into CMUCL), and IBUKI.
 >
 > When Scratchpad was sold to NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) as "Axiom"
 > the whole Axiom effort was replatformed from AKCL to CCL (Arthur Norman's
 > Codemist Common Lisp). The NAG version runs on CCL. Arthur Norman has
 > released a version of CCL under modified BSD and the sources are 
distributed
 > as part of the Axiom system.
 >
 > In the readme file Bill comments that the last version distributed
 > under the old license was akcl-1-624 which was, in fact, the last
 > version that Scratchpad used.
 >
 >
 > GCL may not in fact be a direct derivative of KCL. I know that Bill
 > had plans to rewrite the KCL pieces of the system and, given his
 > level of productive output, likely succeeded. Unfortunately we parted
 > ways once Axiom came out.
 >
 > The basic build process involved compiling a file called "merge.c"
 > which was Bill's "patch" program. It took .V files and did context
 > sensitive replacements from KCL sources to AKCL sources. The .V files
 > no longer exist and there are no @s[ replacement instructions left.
 > The merge.c program still exists in the source tree but appears unused.
 > Thus I believe, but cannot prove, that he completely rewrote the KCL 
part.
 >
 > Bill was extremely sensitive to licensing issues and we had numerous
 > discussions on the subject. I believe, knowing Bill, that he somehow
 > resolved the licensing issue with the KCL people. He was very careful
 > about the licensing issue. He was also deeply aware of the GPL issues
 > as he was a contributor to Emacs sources (look for his name in the
 > dbg handling under Emacs). It is unlikely that he included anything
 > without knowing he had permission.
 >
 > As to the issue of distributing the improvements I believe, but can no
 > longer prove, that the IBM contract was written so that all changes
 > made by Bill were freely distributable. Scratchpad was a research
 > project and I know that, up until the issue of selling Scratchpad
 > started, I could freely distribute the Scratchpad sources if asked. I
 > know that various people have (or had) copies of the sources. The
 > attitude at IBM Research (at least as I understood it) was very
 > close to the one Stallman expected which was "sources? sure. what
 > format would you like them in? tape or 5in floppy?". Bill had basically
 > the same attitude. What little money he made off AKCL was due to 
services,
 > not to selling source code, at least as far as I'm aware.
 >
 > Actually, IBM did pay for the services. Bill was under contract
 > with IBM. At the time we had no plans to sell Scratchpad. We favored
 > Bill's AKCL because (a) Bill could help us port it to many platforms
 > (I wanted Scratchpad to run on everything, including DOS) and (b) Bill
 > was very receptive to helping us optimize Scratchpad as he was also
 > a user and contributor. Furthermore he was an excellent mathematician
 > so he could handle the complexity of Axiom's algebra.
 >
 > The language you use to implement a system (such as Maxima) should not
 > be affected by the language implementation (GCL, Franz) license. At
 > some point you have to try to separate church and state. Isn't there
 > any way to be a programmer without becoming a lawyer also? Must I learn
 > about lache, estopple, waiver, and abandonment in order to program?
 > These days I feel like I should major in Law with a minor in CompSci.
 >
 > Tim Daly
 > axiom@tenkan.org
 > daly@idsi.net
 >
 > P.S. I'll take the $100,000 a year to maintain GCL :-)
 >