I'm not sure I've read this right, and I just don't really care to spend the
time to do so.
But I think that what William Stein (boss of Sage project) has said is that
gplv3 has
the problem that if you use it, certain companies will not use your code,
and that Sage
won't use it either, because he wants Sage to be used everywhere. Yes, even
by Microsoft Research.
And so he has to make a fork of GMP (or MPFR) rather than use their newer
GPLv3 code.
Again, I'm not sure I got this right, and I am not a lawyer.
But Stein seems to think that Sage is OK anyway because it doesn't LINK to
Maxima, it sort of holds it at arm's length and shouts at it. But maybe
that means that Maxima itself can't be used by these companies except at
arm's length.
The point seems to be, though, that GPLv3 has some kind of "poison pill"
attached to it that is an attack on companies that own and trade software
patents. Thus if you want to make your code potentially unusable by anyone
who works for a company that owns patents, and potentially that is a lot of
people, go ahead. Personally, I would find it offensive if a friend who
works at (say) IBM, HP, GE, Apple, Google, Yahoo, or even Microsoft can't
use a program I wrote because of GPLv3. Or one of those companies refuses
to provide research funding support for a graduate student because of GPLv3,
even though they are ok with GPLv2.
Comments from Sage people especially welcome.
(I personally prefer a BSD license, and if that doesn't meet approval, LLGPL
for Lisp code. I think it is perfectly reasonable to have code that I write
be read into someone else's "core image".)
RJF
> -----Original Message-----
> From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu
> [mailto:maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu] On Behalf Of Alexey Beshenov
> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 11:09 AM
> To: Maxima at math.utexas.edu
> Subject: Re: [Maxima] [Maxima-commits] CVS:
> maxima/share/contribsolve_rat_ineq.mac, NONE, 1.1
>
> On Thursday 05 June 2008 20:33, van Nek wrote:
>
> > there has been a discussion on this list the last days about the
> > appropriate license for files in Maxima. Did it really come
> to an end?
> > Maybe I missed something. But anyway, I would be happy, if
> someone will
> > post a file header which can be used from now on. Meanwhile I will
> > use the license statement I found in your link below.
>
> As for the discussion on licensing, we've concluded that
> Maxima is "GPLv2 or
> later" (so it is compatible with GPLv3 code). You're free to
> choose any free
> license (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/) for your code in
> share/contrib though.
>
> I think that GPLv3 is appropriate; using Lesser GPL is
> unnecessary (in my
> opinion)---I don't think that anyone will use contrib stuff
> as a library;
> besides, now FSF rejects LGPL
> (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html).
>