A Maxima function for solving initial value problems with adaptive step size and error control.

I disagree.

GPL is presumably the license for the things that Schelter added to DOE
Maxima; this is the meaning of the "Copyright ...by William Schelter" line
he added to the source files. Clearly he didn't hold the copyright to DOE
Maxima itself. DOE Maxima itself was made available by the DOE under the
GPL.  It may or may not be available under other licenses as well (it may
even be in the public domain given copyright law at the time it was
originally written), but let's leave that aside for the moment.

In any case, there is absolutely no requirement that new share packages
which are not derived from existing code follow GPL.  In fact, legally they
probably don't even need to be "free software" as long as they are simply
distributed along with Maxima, and not incorporated into distributed
binaries.  As the maintainers of Maxima, we can certainly decide that we
will only publish in share code which has a free or open-source license; we
can even decide that we require a license which is compatible with GPL.  But
this includes not just LGPL, but also many others.  Code can also be
multi-licensed under both GPL *and* other licenses which can be incompatible
with GPL. Whether the code is compiled or not is irrelevant.

Robert likes GPL and considers it the "standard license" for share files,
but Robert does not decide for the developer community.  In particular, I
would object to requiring share code to be licensed under GPL.

              -s

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 15:41, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>wrote:

> > I guess I would follow the Maxima "standard" license,
> > although it seems a bit unclear what exactly it is.
>
> Bill Schelter requested from US Dept of Energy permission to
> distribute Maxima under terms of GPL and received from them
> a letter granting permission to do so; that is the DOE letter
> linked on the Maxima web site.
> So I think it is fair to say that the GPL is the standard
> license for Maxima, although if we go into details, it is probably
> not strictly necessary for non-compiled stuff.
>
> Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
>
> best, Robert Dodier
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