Reconsidering the GPL licensing of Maxima

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Viktor T. Toth wrote:
> Last but not least, I find the suggestion that Bill Schelter didn't know
> what he was doing when he put Maxima under GPL somewhat disrespectful. Not
> meaning to compare my work to the enormous job Bill has done, but just in
> case I depart from the land of the living earlier than planned, I'd like to
> state unambiguously that whatever code I release under the GPL is released
> that way because I know exactly what the GPL is :-)
I absolutely agree. I communicated with Bill Schelter (some of my patches 
are in 5.6, which is under GPL). He new perfectly well what he was doing. 
He put GCL under LGPL to make it possible to write commercial applications 
with GCL (unlike the case of gcc, the final product produced by GCL 
contains a copy of the development environment). Maxima is a valuable 
final product. He very reasonably released it under GPL, to protect it 
from commercial companies who could (and do!) want to exploit the work of 
volunteer free software developers. By the way, in the case of GCL, he 
made a mistake: some of the code was not his own, and was only released 
under GPL (unexec; readline). This was corrected (after comments from 
RMS); now full, unabridged GCL is under GPL. There is also a version 
without those GPL components, which is under LGPL.

Andrey Grozin