On 9/21/06, Fabrizio Caruso <caruso at dm.unipi.it> wrote:
> I stumbled upon http://www.symbolics.com/
> Is Macsyma still being sold?
Apparently.
> If any of you has a copy of it, could they tell me if it does something
> that Maxima doesn't do or if it performs better than Maxima?
Commercial Macsyma forked from DOE Macsyma (the basis of Maxima) in
1982. It has many man-years of professional development in it in many
areas, both mathematical and user-interface. On the other hand, there
is no longer either a development or even a support staff any more.
Without access to source code, users cannot modify the core
functionality or fix bugs in it.
> If Macsyma were somehow still in business would the owner of
> Macsyma be allowed to use and sell portions of our code in their software?
Almost all of Maxima is covered by GPL, so it could not be folded in
to the commercial Macsyma codebase unless it were released under a
compatible free/open source license. On the other hand, there is
presumably nothing preventing a user from individually loading in
Maxima code to Macsyma, assuming the interfaces are the same.
-s