On 10/30/06, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 03:26:06 -0800, David Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > > I assume you want to do 2 things: > > 1. translate their PDE solver (numerical or symbolic?), > > 2. translate the DG computation package. > > For 2, I'd contact the guy who presented the work at the conference and > > tell him what you'd like to do. Better yet, you could ask him for help. > > Josh told me that guy had to sign an NDA, so he can't be of any help, > for fear of being sued by Maplesoft. > > > For 1, I imagine this would be quite difficult and don't see that > > "copying" would be an issue. > > My understanding of copyright is that it would be a huge issues. > It could cause massive problems for SAGE. My understanding is > that if one reads the source code of a program then types something > in another language, that new version is a derived work. To do > this with maple code may be a blatant violation of their copyright, > which would be a huge pain. Likewise, if Maple (or MAGMA) > employees were to read source code of SAGE and type in a program > based on what they read, then copyright it as their own with > releasing it under hte GPL, they would definitely be breaking the law. > That's my understanding at least, and I've been told this many times...
Quoting from a lawyer (M. Fishman, *Copyright your software*, Nolo Press, ch 8): "...copyright only protects an authors expression of her ideas, facts, systems and discoveries, not the ideas, facts, systems and discoveries themselves." Moreover, "a work is derivative for copyright purposes only if its author has copied substantial portions for a previous works expression." A good example is Whelan v Jastrow, 1986. A program called Dentalab written in EDL by Whelan was translated into Basic. The program performed bookeeping tasks for a dentist office. Jastrow preserved the way the data was stored and flowed from one function to another. The structure, sequence and organization was preserved. Jastrow lost. I think this job Josh is thinking of is so hard and the differences in languages are so significant that the sequence, structure and organization cannot be preserved. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
