David, On 8/4/07, you wrote: > Though you clearly know more about this stuff than I do, I stand by > my statements. I am very skeptical. Seems like getting NAG to issue a > license was like pulling teeth.
The only things I know about all this is from the meeting with Stephen Watt at ISSAC and a few previous emails via the axiom-developer list to which Mike Dewar is a subscriber. > They obviously want to "poison" Aldor so someone else, > like Maple, doesn't incorporate it into a product and sell it > (as idiotic as that seems). So they choose the worst license for > everyone concerned. > I definitely do *not* think this is the case. I expect that they would very much like MapleSoft to incorporate Aldor as an optional programming language for Maple. Several people, including Stephen Watt have worked on this possibility and have published several papers about how to marry the strongly-typed Aldor language with the untyped Maple environment. But so far Maple has preferred to re-invent the object-oriented approach by extending the Maple programming language. > When everyone (Axiom, FriCAS, even Watt himself!) is saying they will be > working more on extending and improving SPAD, I call that moving away from > Aldor. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. As far as I know Stephen Watt is not working on anything related to Axiom. I do not think he has any interest in SPAD. I hope I did not inadvertently give you that impression in my previous email. > Axiom was the last chance Aldor had. NAG blew it. Steven Watt and > his students will take features they like in Aldor, add them to his > superSPAD or whatever he will call it, and Aldor will be forgotten. > I think you are wrong. Stephen Watt, his colleages at University of Western Ontarion, and his students are actively using Aldor in their teaching and research. > Also, I remember you pushing for the Aldor/Axiom, saying that Aldor would > be the next generation SPAD for Axiom. That is a statement about the past. Aldor was designed specifically to be the next generation of SPAD for Axiom. It was only when Axiom was made open source that for some reason Aldor was not included. I suspect (but do not know for sure) that the reason Aldor was excluded is because Tim Daly - the person negoiating with NAG for open sourcing Axiom - was not interested in Aldor. Tim has said publicly that he was fundamentally against the decision to implement Aldor that way it was implemented at IBM. Tim wanted to implement the 2nd generation Spad in Lisp, but Stephen Watt chose to implement it in C and provided a stand alone C runtime environment in addition to the abililty to general Lisp code for interfacing with Axiom. > In spite of what Dewar said, "... many people have hoped for a more open > license that would be compatible with Axiom." I believe it was me who said that. As far as I know Mike Dewar has not yet replied although he was included in the Cc of my email. > Indeed, aldor.org even advertised that aldor was going to be > released open source. NAG reads aldor.org and that alone tells me > that "NAG lead people on (or let people hope) that Aldor would be open > source." > Whether NAG knows what open source means is another matter. I think your last conclusion is probably correct. NAG's definition of open source is probably different than that promoted by GNU and the open software foundation. > If I was an Axiom developer, I'd be really pissed. > Personally I am past that stage. That is how I felt last year mostly because it was taking so long and in my opinion at that time Axiom development was seriously floundering. Making Aldor available with a license that was compatible with Axiom would have been a very positive development. But several significant things have happened in the Axiom project since then and development is proceeding in spite of the current disagreements in the Axiom project. So now that Aldor will be freely available for non-commercial use I think this is just one small positive step for Axiom. (Of course it could have been a much bigger step if NAG had actually agreed to a compatible license.) Regards, Bill Page. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@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-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
