Dear Aldorados, (:- "Aldorado" = heterographic homophone of Eldorado i.e. "the Golden One" :-)
During the recent Aldor workshop the subject of the relationship between Aldor and Axiom was discussed. Some of the participants expressed the point of view that Axiom was important to Aldor developers as an environment for testing complex math libraries such as BasicMath. In general the interactive 'aldor -gloop' mode was considered too primitive for this purpose, but Axiom fits this role almost perfectly because it includes other library functions that can be very useful for the development and testing new libraries. Whether the new Aldor library is eventually intended to be used stand alone or as part of Axiom is usually not so important. But what is important is the development environment provided by Axiom. This idea came as a bit of a surprise to me since normally I had been thinking of Aldor as a missing and essential part of Axiom - the next generation library compiler. But I realize now that this might work both ways. Of course there are alternatives - such as implementing a more powerful and convenient interpreter directly in Aldor - but this is probably best viewed as a longer term goal which is more easily obtained right now directly from Axiom. So the issue that arises: Now that Aldor is available in an open source form, how best to package Aldor and Axiom to facilitate this use? Currently Aldor's APL2 source license prohibits commercial use of the Aldor source code. This apparently makes it incompatible with GPL. However it might be important to observe that software that is licensed under modified BSD is both GPL and APL2-compatible - meaning that software licensed under modified BSD could be combined with Aldor's APL2 and released as one product under APL2. Axiom is an example of such a package. Although the comments in this email are not intended to be primarily about licensing issues, I can well imagine that because it might divert some resources away from Aldor, aldor.org might be reluctant to package Axiom in this way specifically for use with Aldor. Maybe I am wrong and I would like to hear more opinions about this from Aldor developers. Similarly the current Axiom projects (including FriCAS and OpenAxiom) might be equally reluctant to adopt the non-commercial use clause of APL2 since that would make them incompatible with GPL. So what (if anything) should we (both Axiom and Aldor developers) do about this? Certainly with three Axiom forks already, it might stretch credibility to far to fork Axiom again with an APL2 license just to pursue the original goal of re-implementing the Axiom library in Aldor. Is there an existing Axiom project/fork that is willing to adopt Aldor as the new library compiler? I think that from a technical point of view right now the FriCAS fork of Axiom might be the most suitable system in which to re-implement Axiom libary code in Aldor since FriCAS now builds both the algebra code and the associated databases from directly from source using a new bootstrap procedure. This makes it possible to make deep changes in the Axiom algebra code without encountering Spad errors due to inconsistent database files. But Gaby (the primary developer of OpenAxiom) has also stated that it is the intention of the OpenAxiom project to pursue similar goals as the original Axiom developers. Does this include the goal of re-implementing (all or some part of) the Axiom library in Aldor? Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
