On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 5:11 PM, David Kirkby <[email protected]>wrote:
> On 28 December 2012 16:47, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: > > also make it an optional sage package). > > This is what I was thinking, but I personally thought it worth asking > WRI exactly where we stood if using their protocol. > > At the end of the day, anything you do to circumvent using their > shared library, WRI could put a stop to without changing any code - > just their license conditions. When Mathematica 10 comes out, one of > the conditions of that license is that you can't control Mathematica > from external programs without the use of the Mathlink library. At > That would not be a problem at all. The very sentence that you were half-quoting from my email started: "It will also link in the wolfram mathlink library..." so the mathlink library is used. > which point, although the code would work, it would be against the > license to use it. > I don't even know what to ask them. Do you want them to change their license so that it is GPL-compatible -- that seems ridiculous. > > Hence my feeling it is better to ask WRI, and work with them rather > than against them. > > > The other alternative is reverse engineering the protocol for the > > Mathematica REPL. I can't imagine it is very complicated, since there > are a > > few canonical choices for such things. > > > > William > > 'jmath' has existed for years as a nice GPL'ed front end for > Mathematica, and as far as I'm aware, WRI have never tried to stop it. > So I don't think they would care if Sage implement something similar. > But I personally would rather ask. You see a draft of a mesage I > intended sending, but also the negative comments about it, so I never > bothered. > jmath does not seem to be an example of reverse engineering the MathLink wire protocol. The jmath website ( http://robotics.caltech.edu/~radford/jmath/) explains that jmath is simply an application that links in the MathLink library. > > > > Dave > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-support" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support?hl=en. > > > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support?hl=en.
