Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
Jaap Spies wrote:
> See at the end of:
>
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/2008/011842.html
I don't know what is at stake here from the perspective of Sage,
but so far as I know the current developers of Maxima are not
in a position to change the license by their own agreement.
The code base from which the current developers are working
was released by Bill Schelter under terms of the GNU GPL v2.
(To the best of my knowledge, Schelter never referred to later
versions of the license.) Unfortunately Schelter died in 2001.
To change the license to anything else, it seems necessary to
get approval from Schelter's heirs. If someone wants to contact
them, I certainly can't stop them, but I'm not interested in doing
it myself. In the absence of such approval, I don't see how any
relicensing can go forward. If someone wants to pomote a legal
theory under which relicensing is possible, I'd like to hear about it.
But from what I can tell, a decision amongst the current
developers isn't enough.
FWIW
Robert Dodier