Hi, On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 08:52:03AM -0700, Harald Schilly wrote: > > This should be moved to sage-flame. > > On Friday, August 15, 2014 10:42:14 AM UTC+2, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby > Microwave Ltd) wrote: > > > > If not against the GPL, this certainly seems to be going against the > > *spirit* of the Sage project. > > > > What's the spirit of the Sage project? It's mission statement?
The mission statement is about a "free open source alternative", which SMC is not. > Please explain. In particular, how making an almost unmodified version > of Sage available to a much larger user-base with a greatly reduced > level of entrance (i.e. creating a login credentials vs. downloading > >1GB, installing VirtualBox and running a virtual machine) has any > >implications besides fulfilling the mission... The user-base could be even larger if every university (or whatever) could host its own local cloud and freely adapt it (e.g. translations, ldap interface, ...). > > Maybe it is legal. I don't think it is morally right. > > > > Everyone contributing to Sage is hopefully aware that it is GPL > licensed. The core essence of GPLed code is that it can be used for any > purposes - free (as in beer), commercial, medical, military, energy, > etc. [0] For me it would be morally questionable, if e.g. you would > impose moral considerations about how the code should be used. In > particular, who gives *you* the legitimacy to decide what is a moral use > and what is not a moral use? Nobody should have that. By the closed-source nature of SMC, the University of Washington can impose moral considerations to the users of SMC : if UW considers that some user does not use SMC in a moral way, it can delete its account, and the user will not be able to connect elsewhere to still enjoy its features. > [0] freedom 0, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html > > My own point of view is that there are great examples where using > open-sourced code for different circumstances improves it's quality. > e.g. Linux Kernel, Mozilla Project, … My core argument is, that merely > implanting Sage in different environments doesn't diminish its value or > functionality. The environments could be even more diverse if SMC was free software and widely spread, its quality could be improved if it could be run on various clusters. Your arguments are good, but they all support the open-sourcing of SMC, which was Dave's point (if i understand correctly). > Finally, if you do not like SMC, ignore it. As long as there is a huge advertising of SMC on the sagemath.org front page, and since the development of SMC is (partially) funded by the Sage foundation (whose aim is "To support the development of the mathematical software system SAGE."), this is not really possible. Ciao, Thierry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
