On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Gonzalo Tornaria <torna...@math.utexas.edu> wrote: > I'm particularly interested in your (William) answer to this. >
Dang, I was hoping to not have to respond to this post, but since you explicitly ask me I have no choice. > In some > of your posts seemed as if you were claiming that requiring scripts to > be published under the GPL is the only option (just by the FSF > interpretation of the issue), but I don't know what was your original > intent, and whether you think this is good or just an undesired side > effect of the GPL. Both. I view it as a bad and an undesired side effect... unless I really want to use somebody's code, and then I might suddenly view it is a desired side effect. Over the last few years, I've personally convinced probably well over a dozen people to relicense their code under GPL (or a GPL compatible license), so I could include it in Sage. These include PARI scripts, programs against the PARI library, and other programs. In retrospect, in many cases I was able to convince the author to GPL their code, since their code fundamentally depended on a GPL'd program (e.g., PARI). In one case, I had argued for a week with a certain author about him making his code available under a GPL-compatible license, and at a certain moment we both realized that he had no choice, because his code depended on PARI; his response was to spend several weeks completely rewriting the program so it didn't depend on PARI to work, and releasing the resulting code under a pseudo-BSD license. Building your code on top of GPL'd code has consequences (or responsibilities) and there is no point in ignoring that. It also has rewards, e.g., you can read the source code of the whole stack, change anything, etc., and contribute back knowing that improvements to your contributions won't be locked away in the future. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
