On Nov 25, 2007 4:06 AM, Ondrej Certik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 25, 2007 5:19 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hello, > > > > Some of the Sage developers are considering including Pyx > > (http://pyx.sourceforge.net/) > > in Sage (http://sagemath.org). One issue is that I think Pyx is > > currently licensed GPL v2 only. > > Unfortunately Sage will soon have to start including several new > > versions of GNU programs > > such as GMP, GNUTLs, GSL, etc., and these are all licensed under "GPL > > v3 or greater". > > Also PolyBoRi (http://polybori.sourceforge.net/) will soon be in Sage, > > and it is also "GPL v3" > > licensed. Unfortunately, it is a copyright violation to combine GPL > > v2 and GPL v3 software > > together and redistribute it, since the FSF decided to make GPL v3 be > > If it is true that SAGE is legaly unable to include GPL v2 only and > GPL v3 only programs, not modifying them, not relicensing them, but > just > calling them from Python,
We're not talking about just calling them from Python. If you take a substantial GPL v2 only Python library, take another substantial GPL v3 Python library, say, then install them into Python, and redistribute the result, you're creating a derived work which according to GPL v2 must be GPL v2, but according to GPL v3 must also be GPL v3. Since v2 and v3 are mutually incompatible, this is a license violation. > then FSF did a terrible move, against the > free software and against the end users, which GPL is supposed to > protect. Yes, FSF did indeed make a terrible move. It seriously pisses me off. Note that SAGE has *not* yet included any GPL v3 software yet -- if we wanted to "take a stand against FSF though", it would require somebody forking GSL, GMP, GNUtls, etc., etc..; I don't think anybody is seriously interested in doing that. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
