[sage-devel] Re: Maxima license "GPL v.3 or later"?

2008/6/1 Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>:
> William Stein wrote:
>
>> In fact looking through the actual source code, it mostly says
>> "Copyright William F. Schelter" or "See the GNU General Public
>> License for more details.  You should have received a copy of
>> the GNU General Public License."  The top level of the maxima
>> distribution contains the standard GPLv2 license file, which
>> is "GPLv2+", since it contains the phrase "If the Program does
>> not specify a version number of this License, you may choose
>> any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation."
>
> On considering this, I believe you are correct. Although the license
> Schelter included in his distribution was GPL v2, Schelter never
> specified the revision number to the best of my knowledge.
> Therefore (according to the license itself) licensees can choose
> any version (not just v2+).

As I have mentioned in some other thread, even if most of the code is
GPLv2+, there are files which are GPLv2 only:

http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/share/contrib/stringproc/stringproc.lisp?revision=1.34&view=markup
http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/share/contrib/amatrix/amatrix.lisp?revision=1.1&view=markup
http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/src/ifactor.lisp?revision=1.10&view=markup
...

This makes maxima GPLv2 and not GPLv2+. If it is important for Sage
that maxima is GPLv2+, these things need to be sorted out.

-- 
Andrej