On Friday, May 27, 2016 at 10:34:38 AM UTC-7, William wrote: > > On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 10:30 AM, rjf <fat...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > So you should claim authorship and copyright, and then declare that > others > > may > > use it under whatever restrictions you determine. Personally, I find > the > > MIT or > > Berkeley licenses much better than GPL, since they let anyone use the > code > > for any purpose and don't insist on other conditions. > > Curious: I always imagined that you were the main force behind the > open sourcing of Maxima. Why is the Maxima license GPL instead of MIT > or Berkeley? >
I was the main force in making the Macsyma code available via the Dept. of Energy (a principal, but not sole, sponsor of the Macsyma project at MIT.) The powers at MIT, including my de facto advisor, Joel Moses, wished to take advantage of a gov't rule that gave the academic institution ownership rights to software developed under gov't sponsorship. Through a somewhat convoluted process this resulted in the sale of exclusive commercial rights to Macsyma to Symbolics Inc. In retrospect I think everyone would concede this was a bad idea. I forced MIT to put a copy officially in the Dept of Energy software library; they put a broken copy there. I fixed it up to run "out of the box" on DEC VAX computers running Berkeley UNIX (or, with some help, VAX/VMS). It was not yet free because DOE charged a few hundred dollars, and as a concession to MIT did not allow redistribution. This version used Franz Lisp which we wrote at Berkeley. Franz Lisp was free/open part of Berkeley UNIX. Bill Schelter modified the Macsyma code and added extra pieces and got it running under Kyoto Common Lisp (which he changed and named Austin-Kyoto Common Lisp) and then became GCL. Bill also conferred with DOE and asked for permission to release DOE-Macsyma under GPL. At that time DOE was, I think, giving up on their library business, and so agreed. I think they would have equally well released it under BSD or MIT open source license if Bill had asked for that. I read the permission letter as a "whatever" permission. I had some discussion about the appropriateness of GPL, but Bill's untimely death cut that off. My view then, was that a company with some expertise and resources could have taken the DOE Macsyma code and possibly acquired the commercial Symbolics Macsyma code (by this time the company was defunct), and improved/ supported/ the code. Putting it under GPL was more-or-less poison to such enterprises, RedHat etc to the contrary. The market for Macsyma would be much smaller than Unix. Why did Symbolics, and then later Macsyma Inc, a spin off, fail? 1. They wanted to sell hardware (Lisp Machines) even though the real winner for the software was VAX and Sun hardware [the enemy of Lisp machines]. 2. (I suspect) A collection of incorrect decisions at the marketing and management level. Has GPL achieved its goal with respect to Macsyma / Maxima? Yes, there is no secret version for sale. Side effect: There is no commercial support for it; at least to my knowledge, not a single person has earned a single penny "selling" Macsyma or services, or add-ons. Side effect: The possibility of research funding from a commercial enterprise is essentially zero. (huh, you say?) Historically, the Maple company sponsored research at Univ. Waterloo, in the area of computer algebra. Given the paucity of NSF or other gov't funding for academic research, some schools have found substantial support from private companies. I think Sage has received small grants from Microsoft. My institution / department has received massive amounts of funding from companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. I don't know if these donors would have been turned off by GPL. http://ipira.berkeley.edu/about-us is the web page for Berkeley intellectual property management; they used to be grossly incompetent regarding software, but I don't know about this now. Given the possible continuing govt funding drought for Sage, it would be ironic if the founding principle for Sage --of GPL for everything -- turns out to be a factor in its financial difficulties. On the other hand, I am not claiming that a commercial enterprise "doing Sage" would be so successful that it would spread money far and wide to researchers. I would not expect investors to find grounds to support Sage Inc. It seems to me to be a very small market to try to sell software to mathematics professionals. (cf. Magma). I have advised students to seek other software project areas if their primary goal is to make big money from some startup. Anyway, the simple answer to the original question is -- I wanted a more open license for DoE Macsyma, but GPL was Bill Schelter's choice, and people seemed to like it that way. > > RJF -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
