On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 7:10 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 9:02 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I think the right thing to do in this case is to carefully understand >> the intention of the license (possibly consult with a lawyer), and >> also to possibly write a letter to the OEIS foundation with a petition >> for them to reconsider their license. [...] if >> we just take a breath, carefully understand the situation, and >> possibly get a lot of momentum... > > (Something will appear on the number theory list soon about this.) > I've just also got some offline emails from Neil Sloane, and we (the > Sage project) definitely have their permission to distribute the OEIS > file. This is a something they are letting *us* do, but not > necessarily any other projects.
Erratum: It has been pointed out to me that in fact I misinterpreted Neil's email. English is ambiguous. In fact there is no permission to redistribute a copy of the sequences from OEIS. I'm very disturbed by this whole situation. It disturbs me that fundamental data contributed for free by the community is locked down like this. Projects like Wikipedia [3] (or the human genome project [1]) are leaders that show that it is not necessary for user-contributed content to be restricted like this. This could be a good topic for a letter to the Notices of the American Math Society (like [2]). If anybody reading this is also concerned, please contact me and we can think this through. -- William [1] "It is therefore NHGRI s intent that human genomic DNA sequence data, generated by the projects funded under RFA HG-95-005, should be released as rapidly as possible and placed in the public domain where it will be freely available." http://www.genome.gov/10000926 [2] Look here in the upper right: http://www.ams.org/notices/200710 [3] Wikipedia is Creative Commons licensed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Trademarks_and_copyrights -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
