Wording of Schelter note



On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 10:16 -0500, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> e.g.:
> 
> Maxima is the open-source release of Macsyma, the legendary computer
> algebra system developed in 1967-1982 at the Massachusetts Institute
> of Technology.  The original Macsyma inspired many other systems,
> including the commercial Maple and Mathematica, and they retain a
> strong family resemblance. Maxima is the only publicly-available
> Macsyma descendent with an active user community, which continues to
> maintain and extend it. 
> 
> 
> Maxima was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until his death in
> 2001. In 1998, he obtained permission to release the source code under
> the GNU General Public License (GPL). We thank him for his work, which
> made the survival of Maxima possible.
> 
> 
> Comments?

I like your proposed text better than the current one; however,
there are two things in your proposal that I'd like to reword:

"Maxima is the open-source..."   --> Maxima is the free software...

"the commercial Maple and Mathematica"  --> the proprietary Maple and
Mathematica

Regards,
Jaime Villate