On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:45 PM, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > > On May 5, 11:34 pm, Brian Granger <ellisonbg....@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Licensing discussions just suck and are a waste of time. Sigh .... >> >> Yes, I fully a agree with you....except when people learn new things >> about the GPL. I think some important things have come out of this >> discussion: >> >> * A notebook/Worksheet is source code and can potentially be a >> derivative work of Sage or any of the libraries that Sage ships with. > > Yep. > >> * If a particular Worksheet uses a GPL library, and that Worksheet is >> distributed to the public (not just Shared internally on a single Sage >> notebook server), it must be GPL. > > I think this is far from clear, but the FSF's interpretation of the > license. The OSI thinks differently for example as pointed out > earlier. > >> * Currently, there is not a clear way of indicating or learning about >> the license of a Worksheet. > > That might be so, but why would it matter? If you write code and link > against a GPLed library there is no mechanism to remind someone that > they have to abide by the GPL. But I agree that it is far from obvious > to a user of Sage that the GPL of worksheets is even an issue and > might apply to published Sage code. It would be nice to add something > to the manual that gives various POVs of the problem, but in the end > it should conclude that anyone concerned about this should consult a > lawyer since the Sage project is not in the position to give legal > advice.
We should be honest to our users about some of the potential pitfalls and responsibilities associated with using Sage. When users (or developers) build their work on Sage, they are building their work on GPL'd code, and there are certainly ramifications involved in doing this. For example, they can't just take any of their Sage programs and close source and sell them, etc. It doesn't do any good in the long run to pretend there aren't such ramifications. The situation with Sage is really different than the situation with GIMP or OpenOffice or Emacs, and we should be upfront about that. -- William > >> * The GPL is confusing as hell... > > The main issue here is that there is the letter of the law and the > intend of the GPL. And there is way too much of a grey zone (even if > you limit yourself to US case law) to make me comfortable. And I would > like to emphasize again that just one should just not take the FSF by > their word since they are clearly not a neutral player here. > >> Cheers, >> >> Brian > > Cheers, > > Michael > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
