On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 11:30:03AM +0100, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote:
> 2006/12/18, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>:
> > 4. The thought of buying commercial Macsyma to either revive it as a
> > commercial program, and/or making it open source, or making it LGPL or GPL
> > or "free" has certainly been discussed over the years by numerous parties,
> > including NSF, DARPA, DOE, ONR, NSA, and some number of foundations and
> > commercial firms over the years.
>
> Would this be a good reason not to try to move forward and have it
> released as a free software by bying the code if needed ?
I think there is a compelling argument that the time is right for a
buyout of Macsyma now that the Topping estate owns it. The major
question is how much would it be worth.
Richard Fateman told me that he believed that the original cost of
Topping's buyout was around $150k. My estimate of $500k based on
numbers pulled out of thin air was probably an over-estimate. After
all why would people buy a commercial Macsyma sold by Topping's
company with no support when they could buy Maple or Mathematica with
full support and a thriving community?
The question now comes down to how to negotiate a price with the
estate, and who would be interested in funding it?
We should consider what technical value it has over the existing
Maxima code base.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan