Reconsidering the GPL licensing of Maxima

Wolfgang Jenkner wrote:


> 
> 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
> 

I think your argument is very interesting, and I was also looking at
other projects by Bill to see what could be inferred.  I had not
seen this one, so I'm glad you found it.

  What is interesting is that Bill did not specify which GNU public
license. GPL, LGPL?   The usual, expected, (and required, I think)
file which contains the license text, or a pointer to the text of GPL
(etc.) is not part of the project, at least when I unpacked it.

So your discovery also suggests that Bill wasn't really attentive
to the license issue, at least for this project.  (By the way, I
didn't try to run this calendar program, but I searched through it
for mention of GPL or GNU and found only that one mention in README).

It occurs to me that the reference to GNU public license may be
to counterbalance any claims that the Univ. of Texas, mentioned
in the previous line, might have on Bill's work.  Especially in
the past, some universities (my own, for example) tried to treat
software written by faculty under some kind of "sharing"
arrangement allowing the university to assert technology transfer
rightes etc.

It is certainly not my desire or intention to show disrespect toward
Bill Schelter or toward his ability to understand legal issues.
I think he was, like many (but not all) academics, principally
concerned with advancing knowledge, and sharing it.  I find
it hard to understand some parts of GPL, and I don't even bother
reading "shrink wrap" agreements. I would hate for someone
to toss one of those up in my face tell me that I now owe
something to Adobe because I loaded Acrobat Reader on my
computer.  Bill was certainly more informed about GPL than
I am about Adobe's End User License Agreement.  But maybe
not an expert. That's why I am trying to
figure out what he most likely intended, and to respect those
intentions.  I appreciate Wolfgang's contribution.