On Dec 15, 2007 8:40 PM, Vadim V. Zhytnikov <vvzhy at mail.ru> wrote:
> Jaime Villate writes:
> > 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
> >
>
> Yes, this rewording is quite important.
>
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware
The definition of free software is here:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The definition of open source software is here:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd
The page you cite argues why the first is better than the second. I
don't agree with some of it and would prefer if the first page
emphasized practical implications of using GPL instead of
philosophical implications.
Perhaps a better term would be free and open source software (FOSS) or
free/libre open source software (FLOSS), which describes both terms
without a bias towards one of them.
--
Andrej