On 12/15/05, Richard Fateman wrote:
> I think it would be counterproductive to assume
> that material is licensed under GPL (there is
> a version for documents, too), or to assert that
> future contributions are so licensed.
About the reference manual, my point is that since the
version we are now working on was part of the bundle
release by William Schelter under the terms of the GPL,
the manual is also GPL. We couldn't change that if
we wanted to.
> I think that all the material I have written in
> whatever tutorial material there is
>
> 1. I hold the copyright to.
> 2. I give permission to other people to use.
>
> I do not know what the creative commons etc
> licenses say. I think that material contributed to
> a common on-line site might best be allowed as
> public domain, or if someone wants to start a
> Maxima Foundation, with board etc. so that something
> can own something, that might be better. Or worse.
>
> Some subsequent modifications of my written work
> do not constitute changes I like, but that's OK,
> if someone else claims authorship of something broken.
> Just don't take my words, change them, and then say
> I said them.
I'm not seeing a pressing reason to assign copyrights
to a third party such as a Maxima Foundation.
I'd rather see authors retain their copyrights.
The potential benefit of copyright assignment is that
it might be necessary (depends on who you listen to)
to round up all copyright holders to file a lawsuit against
someone who breaks the license terms, and that's easier
if there's a single copyright holder.
The downside is that copyright assignment discourages
authors, since they truly don't own their work anymore.
(So long as author retain their copyrights, they are free
to license their works in different ways to different parties
as they see fit.)
> I do not expect that Joel Moses will answer any
> email on this topic, since he has not answered any similar
> mail in the past 25 years.
We don't need to contact the original authors of the
reference manual because the manual is covered
under the blanket statement made by DOE to Schelter,
and Schelter's releasing all of Maxima under GPL.
It's the later stuff that we need to reconsider.
Hope this helps,
Robert