On Feb 3, 1:27 pm, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote:
> There is quite a bit of discussion going on at
> tickethttp://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/4890about nauty's interactive
> installation that demands that a user agree to a license. I originally
> made that spkg and the result of the discussion at that time was that an
> interactive license was needed. There is strong disapproval of having
> an interactive license now. The end of the discussion on the ticket
> points to having a thread on sage-devel to address the question. For
> your convenience, here is the last comment:
>
> "> I would still not call this interactive error message "stupid" since
> > it was done deliberately.
>
> "I think interactive license agreements are annoying. They are all done
> deliberately.
>
> "> Nauty is not only non-free, but its license prohibits its use for
> > works involving primarily military applications, so this is not about
> > non-GPL vs. GPL.
>
> "Nauty is free as in beer, but the free license it is under is not
> "libre" i.e., not OSI approved and not GPL-compatible. Nauty's license
> is: "Permission is hereby given for use and/or distribution with the
> exception of sale for profit or application with nontrivial military
> significance." There are essentially no other restrictions.
>
> "Since we have a fundamental disagreement here, this will need to be
> discussed on sage-devel and possibly voted on."
>
> Note that in this case, apparently nauty is included in an (optional?)
> package we install with gap, so at least there is inconsistency here.
The fact that nauty is part of some gap related spkg and we do not
have a warning there does not mean that we should proceed the same way
with the nauty.spkg also. I would in fact vote for either removing
nauty from the gap-essentials.spkg (unless it is only the bindings) or
also requiring an iterative license. A lot of things ended up in the
essential gap.spkg that these days would not even make it into Sage
without a lot of mandatory cleanup.
> Does someone (William?, mabshoff?) want to explicitly state the proposal
> we are voting on?
>
> Personally, I don't care either way. I guess I've been weaned off of
> nauty for a while now, thanks to Robert's good code :).
This is not free vs. non-free, the point it that no other piece of
free or commercial software either in the optional/experimental spkg
repo or otherwise available via a pexpect interface does not restrict
the user in any way on what to use that piece of software for. Nauty
does restrict the user. We do have a significant number of users who
the nauty restriction does apply to and I take offense of having the
ticket summary contain the word "stupid". The decision to make the
license agreement interactive was made after deliberate discussion on
sage-devel and the ticket IIRC. And people installing spkgs do not
first do a license audit, so the interactive spkg-install prevents
anyone from accidentally installing nauty when they should not.
So I vote to keep the license agreement, but we can make it so that if
some env variable (maybe SAGE_MILITARY_USE_OK == yes) is set where no
one can claim to have set it by accident does skip the interactive
portion of spkg-install. The same should apply to whatever gap related
spkg that contains either nauty or nauty bindings and we should
consider splitting it off the spkg to make things simpler license
wise.
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
Cheers,
Michael
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