LIcenses [Re: A Maxima function for solving initial value problems with adaptive step size and error control.]

Ray, even for the core of Maxima, GPL does not require that components be
licensed under GPL.  In particular, they can be licensed under any
GPL-compatible license.  But to avoid messiness and chaos, I'd be OK with
requiring either LGPL or GPL (as well as any other licenses the author wants
to multilicense under).

                -s

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 17:01, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:
>
>> I disagree.
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I agree with you.  For code in share, I would prefer, perhaps, GPL, but I
> wouldn't require it.  For things in src, I would say it must be GPL since it
> represents the core of Maxima.
>
> Note, however, that the slatec routines are in src/numerical and these
> include some special functions and quadpack.   The license for slateci is
> definitely not GPL.  Perhaps they should be moved out of src into another
> directory?  Slatec might be in the public domain so we could slap GPL over
> it, but that seems not nice.
>
> Ray
>
>