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).

> And for himself, I think it would have been consistent with my
> interactions with him, that he chose to have his OWN code covered by
> this disclaimer.  Namely "use it if you want to, but don't sue me."

As far as Maxima is concerned, that was at a time were he didn't have
full control over the licensing conditions.

But here is a project entirely of his own, viz.

ftp://ftp.ma.utexas.edu/pub/maxima/seminar.tgz

The included README begins with

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

===== Copyright William F. Schelter 1998 ========

This calendar program was written by William Schelter at the University  of Texas.
It may be freely copied under the provisions of the GNU public license.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Of course, everybody knows of his contributions to Emacs and Gcc, but
this here is a TCL program, which per se wouldn't necessarily suggest
GPL, I guess.  So, in this case, GPL was definitely his choice.

Wolfgang