On 30 November 2012 15:53, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Friday, November 30, 2012 6:36:32 AM UTC-5, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: >> >> It's clear there might be legal issues if Mathematica linked to Sage >> using Mathlink, so I was thinking of sending the email below to both >> the FSF and Wolfram Research. Any comments? >> > > I guess I don't see the point. Are we really thinking Wolfram would want to > do that?
Given that they provide the API free for non-commerical use, and can provide it (I assume at some cost), for commerical software, I don't see any big reason they should not allow Sage to connect to Mathematica via the API. I asked them once before if they minded if we used output from Wolfram|Alpha and used that in our doc tests, to at least ensure both software were giving the same answer. They said that was OK, as long as we were not making automatic queries to Wolfram|Alpha. To be honest, I suspect the biggest issue will be whether Sage could remain GPL if it did this. I suspect it could, if the necessary code to connect to Mathematica was under a different license and an optional package. > R really closed a gap for them, and I think some other Sage > components might as well, but Sage proper would seem beside the point, even > if they wanted to do so. I can't see Wolfram Research wanting to include Sage in Mathematica. But what legal issues there would be in providing a better interface to Mathematica is not so simple to answer. I've tried using the Sage-> Mathematica interface, and when I tried, it was broken. It got fixed, but unless it is tested regularly, I suspect it will get broken again. Using pexpect, you are relient on the command line interface to Mathematica not changing, which is a bit risky. In contrast, the API is unlikely to change. 'jmath' was written a decade ago, but when I last tried it (a year or two back), it worked with the latest version of Mathematica. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
