On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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.
Your summary of what happened and one of the reasons
is mostly accurate, and I think I agree with it overall.
If anybody has any specific questions, feel free to ask.
Note that our GMP alternative is called MPIR = multiprecision
integers and reals; we're definitely not forking MPFR.
I am not a lawyer, and I make no claims that
Microsoft's evident "no GPLv3" policy makes any sense
on any technical or legal grounds. It's just a fact they
have it right now, and it's also a fact that I would (really!)
like for people at Microsoft Research (and other local
companies like Boeing say) to be able to use Sage.
(I live in Seattle, so these are the big local companies for me.)
One possibly good thing that comes out of this is
that Microsoft seems much less GPLv2 adverse now that
there is the GPLv3. :-)
-- William
>
>> -----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).
>>
>
>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org