Google has been instrumental in releasing several previously closed or
orphaned software packages into the Free Software community. One
recent example is the Tesseract OCR package.
Undoubtedly, Google itself has engineers who either use, or would
consider using Maxima if they knew about it. Google has also been
instrumental through its Summer of Code program in improving several
free software packages.
Macsyma has essentially languished as a marginal commercial product
for several years. The rate of development on maxima is on the other
hand actually growing.
What is the chance that we could convince Google to buy out, or
provide matching funds for a buy out of commercial Macsyma for release
under the GPL and eventual incorporation into maxima? A similar buyout
was arranged for the Blender 3D modelling system back in 2002 (100k
euros for the GPL release).
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to go about contacting the
appropriate person within Google or within the current holding company
that owns Macsyma (Wikipedia claims it's called Tenedos LLC)?
IBM released Axiom recently, perhaps they could be convinced to chip
in to such a buyout bid.
It seems so senseless to have such a valuable package of code
languish.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan