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

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:

> 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).


Yes, there's the "mere aggregation" clause in the GPL, and it's relatively
easy to make a case that the share directory is an aggregation, but src, I
think, is a more difficult case to make.  Is it just mere aggregation?  And
how can you tell, once all the relevant parties are no longer around?

But I am not a lawyer either.

But for the record, anything that I have placed in src (like my elliptic
functions code), is GPL.  Anything that I have done in share is under some
license that I haven't decided on.  Possibly public domain or BSD, or LGPL.

Note that f2cl-lib and the code generated by f2cl is under some license.  I
think it's LGPL, but I'll have to look that up.

Ray


>
>                 -s
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> 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
>>
>>
>