It isn't illegal to contact someone to complain about something they are doing wrong. (I might argue that the opposite is in fact the case.)
It is illegal to "annoy" someone by email without using your real name (the Patriot Act). As I understand it, the Free Software Foundation are very careful on this point. They consider it spam to do otherwise. It is perfectly legal to encourage people to sign a petition, even one that will be sent to a named individual, even if that petition names the individual. Here is an example of the FSF doing that: http://www.fsf.org/news/ibad_launch It is illegal to write defamatory statements on a website. A valid defence against a defamation lawsuit is that the statements are true. It is my understanding that the statements on the website in question, are however, false. I understand that William has had a battle for some months to get either (a) an explicit example of something which would back up the allegations made on the gmplib.org website OR (b) for the false statements to be removed. I wish to publicly thank William for making such an extraordinary effort to resolve this matter and over such a long period. This has been immensely time consuming for him. We are all indebted to him for his support and his example. This sort of issue hurts the Open Source mathematical community at large, the University of Washington, the Sage project, the MPIR project, and the reputations of other parties involved. Does no one else feel the same way about this? Is William the only tenured academic who is prepared to step in? It would seem to be perfectly legal if other individuals and academics wanted to sign their names to a public petition requesting that the maintainer of the gmplib.org website remove the statements about MPIR. Finally, I wish to correct a minor point, as I was personally party to the details. The Free Software Foundation actually pointed out *two* minor compliance issues to the MPIR project. The first was a missing license text in one of our tarballs. The GPL v3+ license was there, but the LGPLv3+ one was missing. It was correct in the numerous other tarballs, and the omission from one tarball was an embarrassing oversight. It has been rectified! The second issue was about a "prominent notice" of the overall license of those tarballs being made on our website. This is a requirement of the GPL v3. Although we had a "prominent notice", in fact several such, the Free Software Foundation felt that it wasn't quite clear enough. They advised us on how we could alter the statement to make it clearer, and we fixed this issue too. It is abundantly clear from their wording to us that they considered us to be very near to compliance and that they wanted to help us "over the line". We appreciate their advice and help in this matter and the pragmatic approach they have taken. I wish to reiterate that at no point has the MPIR project deliberately taken any v3 code from GMP and reverted the license or license headers to v2.1. In fact, no prominent notice was made on the GMP website regarding the license of the 30 odd lines of patches that we did apply to MPIR. I cannot prove that statement, as the internet archive of the gmplib.org site (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gmplib.org) is curiously missing from just prior to the precise date that we applied the patches and onwards (see the date given in http://trac.mpir.org/mpir_trac/ticket/71 where it is stated, "I have very carefully applied all GMP issued patches through 25/08/2008"). This is an unfortunate coincidence. However, prior archives of the gmplib site from a few days prior, e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20080822175157/http://gmplib.org/ show clearly that no "prominent notice" was given as to the license of the patches there distributed. I should note that the license of the patches is nowadays correctly noted on the gmplib website. Shortly after being notified that the license of the 30 or so lines of patches we had applied to MPIR was in fact v3+, we rectified this issue as soon as practicable and notified the person who made the complaint (Torbjorn), and the copyright holder (FSF). Some time later further allegations appeared on the gmplib site. This was despite assurances that no public fuss would be made about the issue. We have subsequently verified that it is the intent of the copyright holder to only issue patches (bug fixes) under the new v3+ license, even when the vulnerabilities exist in code issued under the previous v2.1 license. This is their right, and we have accepted that fact and we made the appropriate changes many months ago, as already noted. Because we did not want to appear to be "covering something up" we chose to retrospectively recognise the v3+ license of these previous MPIR tarballs and posted statements about this issue on our website and modified our tarballs accordingly. MPIR 1.3.x is an exception to this. It does not and never has contained the v3+ patches in question. MPIR 1.3.x tarballs are the only ones we currently distribute under a v2.1+ license. It does not contain the patches in question and to our knowledge contains no v3+ code whatsoever. Again, if anyone has information that says otherwise, please let us know. It is not the intention of MPIR to violate anyone's license, even accidentally. Most of what I have said here is a matter of public record, I only wish to draw people's attention to it for information sake. Again, let me thank William for his efforts in trying to deal with this issue. I am sorry it has proved so difficult and time consuming for him. Bill. On 17 May, 19:13, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 10:21 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Nathan O'Treally <not.rea...@online.de> > > wrote: > >> On 17 Mai, 12:09, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > >>>http://gmplib.org/ > > >>> says > > >>> **Projects using GMP** > >>> There are many interesting projects that rely on GMP. Here are a few > >>> examples, > >>> in alphabetic order: > > >>> # Sage is a free mathematics software system, which is gradually becoming > >>> a > >>> viable alternative to non-free computer algebra systems. " > > >>> That's not true any more. > > >> Well, MPIR is derived from GMP (4.2.1)... > > > (1) I sometimes build Sage against GMP for testing purposes, and there > > is an spkg that does this too. > > > (2) Remark: Since anyone using GMP could use MPIR, technically nothing > > fundamentally relies on GMP. > > > (3) Getting anything changed athttp://gmplib.orgis difficult. For > > example, that page currently asserts > > > * "MPIR, a renamed GMP based on an obsolete version of the GMP > > sources, maintained by a group of people with funding from Microsoft. > > This GMP version uses an old LGPL license (version 2.1), but has > > nevertheless taken code from current GMP and downgraded the license > > without our authorisation. See e.g., this page were they say "I have > > very carefully applied all GMP issued patches through 25/08/2008". > > They are still through the University of Washington network > > distributing MPIR tarballs with the LGPL 3 code as if they had a LGPL > > 2 license (2010-05-05)." > > > I have written to them about 20 times to get this changed. I even > > wrote to the FSF about this, and they contacted me, did an audit, and > > made a specific list of one single minor item that had to be fixed on > > the MPIR website so that we would be in full compliance. We fixed > > that weeks ago. Yet still the above completely false statement > > remains on the GMP website. > > > If anybody feels personally annoyed by howhttp://gmplib.orgposts > > this false statements, the email addresses you can write to in order > > to complain are: > > > gmp-disc...@gmplib.org, > > "Torbjorn Granlund" <t...@gmplib.org>, > > "license-violation" <license-violat...@gnu.org>, > > I just want to emphasize, that I'm not encouraging anybody to "harass" anyone. > If you feel that the gmplib.org website is incorrect and being abused, > and care about this, I am asking only that you write a mature and > reasoned email explaining your concerns. That is all. > > I'm adding this, because Torbjorn just wrote to me claiming that > asking people to express their views is an international crime: > > Delivered-To: wst...@gmail.com > Received: by 10.90.115.3 with SMTP id n3cs29685agc; > Mon, 17 May 2010 10:28:55 -0700 (PDT) > Received: by 10.213.82.141 with SMTP id b13mr2576701ebl.96.1274117335078; > Mon, 17 May 2010 10:28:55 -0700 (PDT) > Return-Path: <t...@gmplib.org> > Received: from shell.gmplib.org (gmplib-02.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.242]) > by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 5si5623294eyh.14.2010.05.17.10.28.54; > Mon, 17 May 2010 10:28:54 -0700 (PDT) > Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 130.237.222.242 is neither > permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of t...@gmplib.org) > client-ip=130.237.222.242; > Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: > 130.237.222.242 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record > for domain of t...@gmplib.org) smtp.mail...@gmplib.org > Received: by shell.gmplib.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) > id 0FA578275; Mon, 17 May 2010 19:28:54 +0200 (CEST) > To: William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [sage-devel] Re: GMP web sites says Sage relies on GMP > References: <4bf115ec.5060...@onetel.net> > <c9f1893a-f4ea-451b-b6a0-7e02ac7c6...@u7g2000vbq.googlegroups.com> > <aanlktilx3gk8ulkodwlx1cugo9i192izxdsafpjda...@mail.gmail.com> > From: Torbjorn Granlund <t...@gmplib.org> > Sender: t...@gmplib.org > Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 19:28:53 +0200 > In-Reply-To: <aanlktilx3gk8ulkodwlx1cugo9i192izxdsafpjda...@mail.gmail.com> > (William Stein's message of "Mon\, 17 May 2010 10\:21\:08 -0700") > Message-ID: <861vda77ze....@shell.gmplib.org> > User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.3 (berkeley-unix) > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > Now you are going too far, Urging people to harass me is illegal in both > your jurisdiction and in mine. > > --=20 > Torbj=F6rn > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL:http://www.sagemath.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
