Maxima Book



On Friday 30 May 2008 21:30, Jaime Villate wrote:

>> Unfortunately, this, I am pretty sure, is incorrect.
>> There is no legal entity "The Maxima Project" so it cannot hold any
>> copyrights.
>
> You're absolutely right. Notice that in the footer of the Webpages we
> are currently making the same mistake:
>
>   (c) 2002?2008 Maxima CAS development team.

For the webpages, it's better than nothing. We should consult a lawyer before 
treating it as a mistake and trying to find a way to correct it.

It seems that we should refer to some non-profit organization. For example, 
every GNU project refers to the FSF in copyright notes.

> I've just committed to the CVS a complete ChangeLog file for the English
> version of the manual. There are actually not that many parties
> involved; what makes it complicated is that different contributors have
> appear at different types. Based on the CVS ChangeLog, I would suggest
> the following copyright:
>
> Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, W. Schelter
> Copyright (c) 2002, J. Amundson, W. Jenker, D. Stanger, R. Toy
> ?Copyright (c) 2003, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, D. Stanger, R. Toy
> Copyright (c) 2004, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, R. Dodier, D. Stanger,
>     V. Toth, R. Toy, V.V. Zhytnikov
> Copyright (c) 2005, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, R. Dodier, M.R.
>     Riotorto, D. Stanger, V. Toth, R. Toy, B. Willis, V.V. Zhytnikov
> Copyright (c) 2006, J.B. Abreu, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, R. Dodier,
>     M.R.Riotorto, D. Stanger, V. Toth, R. Toy, V. van Nek, J. Villate,
>     A. Vodopivec, B. Willis, V.V. Zhytnikov
> Copyright (c) 2007, J.B. Abreu, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, R. Dodier,
>     D. Gildea, M.R.Riotorto, D. Stanger, V. Toth, R. Toy, V. van Nek,
>     J. Villate, A. Vodopivec, B. Willis, V.V. Zhytnikov
> Copyright (c) 2008, J.B. Abreu, J. Amundson, D. Billinghurst, R. Dodier,
>     A. Eder, D. Gildea, M.R.Riotorto, D. Stanger, V. Toth, R. Toy,
>     V. van Nek, J. Villate, A. Vodopivec, B. Willis, V.V. Zhytnikov
>
> what do you think?

As far as I know, most of the core documentation dates to pre-Schelter time, 
so it's not fair to write that the User Manual was created in 2000--2008.

Such long list should be in the "Acknowledgements" section, but not in the 
copyright note.

> The next question will be: should we keep the "GPL v.2 or later", or
> should we already use "GPL v.3 or later"?

For the documentation, FDL should be used.

[...]

I should say that the current documentation is far from perfect and there are 
some legal issues, so publishing it as soon as possible seems to be a bad 
idea.

-- 
Alexey Beshenov <al at beshenov.ru>
http://beshenov.ru/
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