Reconsidering the GPL licensing of Maxima



Richard Fateman  writes:

> Actually, I don't see GPL to be consistent with Bill's intentions, and
> believe the insertion of GPL in later versions (post-DOE-letter) to be his
> mistaken view that he was respecting the DOE perspective (see COPYING
> and COPYING1).  Really the DOE perspective was: do whatever you want,
> including commercialization.  Bill was not a lawyer.

There can be no doubt that Schelter knew perfectly well the
differences between GPL and, say, LGPL.  Please read

ftp://ftp.ma.utexas.edu/pub/gcl/GCL.README

On the other hand, on reading the letter from DOE,

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/misc.shtml

I doubt that its author understood the idea behind the GPL.

Wolfgang