On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:42 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi Sage-Devel (cc: Markus),
>
> After emailing with Markus Hohenwarter -- director of Geogebra -- and
> looking around at the code, I get the impression that the Geogebra group is
> very well meaning and a great group of people doing some wonderful things
> in math education.  Unfortunately, it appears they are also possibly violating
> the GPL in order to ensure complete control over their project (which
> is something
> the GPL doesn't allow).  I want to emphasize that I think they are well 
> meaning
> and aren't doing this out of any sort of evil intentions, and of
> course I strongly
> applaud their putting a lot of effort into open source math software and math
> education, much of it likely voluntary.
>
> I think that Geogebra has to be GPL'd because it fundamentally depends on
> the java version of the GPL'd yacas library (yacas = yet another computer
> algebra system).  On the other hand, it seems that the Geogebra folks 
> purposely
> criple Geogebra by making the build system, language files (?), and
> documentation
> all non-GPL compatible.  As a result it seems that one can't use
> Geogebra under the
> terms of the GPL.   This might be a violation of the GPL.
>
> (Note that I wrote "seems" and "might" in several places above, since I'm
> not really certain of anything.  I could be just plain wrong!)
>
> So I don't think (optional) integration or support of Geogebra from
> Sage is a wise move right now.  I very much hope the situation with
> Geogebra changes asap.  I.e., in my opinion, the Geogebra group should
> either make the Geogebra distribution fully GPL'd or they should replace
> YACAS by another non-GPL'd component and switch to a license

Like by some BSD based component? :)

Is the end result good for open source alternatives to Ma*?

Ondrej

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