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

On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 21:05 +0200, Andrej Vodopivec wrote:
> 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
> ...

You are the author of two of those packages. Do you have any special
reason to release those two packages with a GPLv2 only?

-If you don't, can you please change the license to the default GPL2
 so we can continue to develop Maxima as his original author intended
 to?
-If you insist on using your own modified GPL2 only, could you please
 move your package ifactor from src/ into share/contrib?

The packages in share/contrib are add-on packages which a user can
choose not to download, without changing the standard Maxima behavior.
Therefore, the licenses of the packages in share/contrib do not dictate
the overall license for Maxima.

Regarding Sage, of course there is no license conflicts with Maxima.
They are distributing Maxima and many other packages in the same sense
that Ubuntu is distributed in a CD with thousands of different packages
modified to work in harmony; some of the packages in Ubuntu have
incompatible licenses, but as long as they are all free software, Ubuntu
can distribute them without any legal issues. Keep up the good work,
Sage developers.

Regards,
Jaime Villate