On 10/16/2014 03:28 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> Well, GPL was not designed to extract benefits from other people. 
> Goal of GPL is to preserve freedom of software.

Right. I cannot force other people to give me their improvements.
But if they distribute anything, they have to distribute the source and
in particular give me the right to use and distribute their improvements.

> OTOH GPL causes inconvenice (some reasonable things are forbidden by
> GPL).  At least for now BSD looks like better choice.

Maybe BSD looks better for you, but what exactly is your fear with GPL?
What are thoses "reasonable things"?

>> The GPL license of fricasmath.sty does not have any impact 
>> whatsoever on the rest of the FriCAS code.

> One thing is that putting GPL fragment inside a file in a driectory 
> when every other file uses BSD licence is misleading

For this very reason the FSF suggests to put a license notice into every
single file (which FriCAS has if I am not wrong).

I actually find it rather ignorant if some people ignore those license
issues and just carelessly take whatever they can get on the Internet
and publish it as their own. So I don't support careless people.

> OTOH careful folks which have automats which scan files for
> copyright notices may think everything is GPL.

Oh well, there is some truth in it. There are many people who don't
understand that the GPL does not necessarily affect code that is
distributed alongside with it.

> Second, impact is much wider than you wrote.  AFAIU current legal 
> theory is that result of running TeX on a file including your style 
> file is derived work, so subject to GPL.  Given that the style file 
> is needed to use TeX output from FriCAS, this would mean that 
> including FriCAS output in a paper makes the paper GPL.

Come on. TeX is a programming language. The text of the paper is data.
Where in the GPL is written that the program under GPL makes the data
GPL? Are you distributing your pictures that you produced by GIMP under GPL?

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL

I don't see that fricasmath.sty copies anything of it's program into the
pdf or dvi file.

If you fear GPL, then I hope you have not (by accident) used any of those

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/preview
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/hyperlatex
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/python
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/eqnarray
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/program
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/dot2texi
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/units
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/classicthesis/

> IMHO you did too much work on tex.spad, instead of complete rewrite 
> incremental changes should give the same effect.

I don't think so. My tex.spad gives the user runtime flexibility. That
would have been impossible with incremental changes. In fact, the new
tex.spad is actually rather simple if one looks at it. The most
important things are listed in a table like structure. I hope that some
day I can also use that structure to "improve" the other output formatters.

> Certainly it would be easier to test and verify smaller change.

Maybe, but the old code was buggy. (Maybe mine is too.) But the test
suite covers quite a lot of cases. And it can easily be run with the old
code.

https://github.com/hemmecke/fricas/blob/tex-latex/src/input/textest.input

> Im just telling you that since I had little time for FriCAS it was
> much harder to find time to look at bigger piece than on few
> independent smaller pieces.

Well... I'm not really complaining, but it's just more fun to do
something if one sees other people appreciating it.

Ralf

PS: Maybe I should think about the license of both files fricas.sty and
fricasmath.sty. What's your opinion about LPPL 1.3+ ?

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