On Dec 12, 2007 10:10 PM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Dec 12, 2007 10:00 PM, pgdoyle <> wrote: > > Hi William, > > > > If we set up a sage notebook server on a machine with mathematica > > installed, and let the general public sign up for accounts, > > then the general public will be able to run mathematica through the > > sage browser. And without having looked at the license > > agreement for our mathematica installation, I can be pretty sure that > > this is something Wolfram will have tried to prevent. > > I imagine other people will have pondered this, and I wonder what the > > current thinking is about it. > > Wow, from this point of view, Sage suddenly seems to have the potential > to be a threatening copyright circumvention device or something, like > bittorrent. I definitely hadn't thought of things in quite that way > before. > > Anyway, I'm certain that doing what you describe above > would be a violation of the Wolfram license > agreement, and I am careful never to do it (e.g., sagenb.org only > has free software available). Maybe -- I do *not* know for sure -- > you could do this if instead you let only people who are authorized to use > that copy of Mathematica anyways get accounts. E.g., at UW we have a site > license for Mathematica, so all students, staff, and faculty at UW > could legally use Mathematica severed via a Sage notebook using > campus-owned equipment. > > Alex Clemesha -- you used WebMathematica a lot, and the Sage notebook > was your vision -- do you have any clarifying remarks to add above?
I think the bittorrent analogy is perfect in this case: You can use it for 'good' (i.e. distribute copies of Sage when sagemath.org is get slammed by tons of traffic) ... or you can use it 'illegally', by violating copyright ... with bittorent you can get virtually any piece of copyrighted digital media you want. If you open up a Mathematica kernel to anyone on the web, you are using the notebook to do something illegal, which should not be done. The sage notebook is free for everyone, so utimately this is hard to control. Alex > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/ and http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
