Daniel Lakeland wrote:
> 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.
I would be rather surprised if Google could justify the expense, but of
course it wouldn't hurt to ask.
> 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).
Blender was/is much more general purpose/of commercial interest than
Macsyma, I'm afraid.
> 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)?
The starting point is probably the guy running www.symbolics.com, I
believe both it and Macsyma Inc. are both under the same control.
> IBM released Axiom recently, perhaps they could be convinced to chip
> in to such a buyout bid.
Actually that was NAG who released it, although I believe IBM was
consulted. NAG had discontinued it as a commercial product. I doubt
either IBM or NAG have any special interest in Macsyma, but again it
probably can't hurt to ask.
> It seems so senseless to have such a valuable package of code
> languish.
Agreed.
CY