GPL vs LGPL vs CAS
From: Richard Fateman (fateman_at_cs.berkeley.edu)
Date: 01/29/05
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Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:02:32 GMT
Again, this is probably not the right newsgroup,
but I think that the USERS of computers for
symbolic mathematics would benefit from the
coordination of all software, free or commercial.
It is in fact possible that Maplesoft WILL improve
GMP (i.e. give something back) even if it does
not have to.
I think the mixture of free / LGPL / commercial
software works pretty well in the Lisp community,
where various pieces of software, some contributed
by vendors, work on all ANSI Common Lisp implementations,
commercial or free.
Most people will agree that it is a fairly daunting task for the
free-CAS community to duplicate or surpass existing
commercial CAS facilities in full generality.
So a person who insists on using only GPL and
non-commercial software
will not have access to all the best software, at
least any time soon.
(It is, as has been frequently
demonstrated, possible for researchers to
exceed commercial CAS in particular respects, e.g.
speed on certain problems. This is not the "generality"
dimension of superiority.)
Government research funding in the USA for building
computer algebra systems is $0. The continuing prospect
of EU funding for building a free system is, to me,
unclear. The fact that MuPAD went in part
commercial, suggests a problem in funding. There
is the RISA/ASIR free system in Japan, but I suspect
it is moving slowly if at all.
On the other hand, one formerly commercial system, Axiom
is now free. Macsyma, in reality the Maxima
system based on an older version which was always open-source,
has become more popular because the commercial 'fork'
is no longer supported. I understand that Sun Microsystems
is going "open source". So maybe commercial development
has a positive effect on free software, eventually.
Conclusion: I think it would be a mistake to let
doctrinaire adherence to GPL impede activities in CAS.
RJF
>>> This is not possible since NTL is GPL-ed (unless the
>>> license is changed or unless Maple
>>> becomes licensed under the GPL which I seriously doubt!).
>>> That's one advantage of GPL-ed CAS, they can link
>>> to these kind of excellent libraries (like for example
>>> Giac/Xcas with PARI and NTL).
>>
>>
>>
>> From version 9 on, Maple uses GMP (which is LGPL-ed) for many operations
>> on large integers.
>>
>
> I can only hope that someone will fork GMP and release
> an enhanced version under the GPL (that is allowed by
> the LGPL) so that proprietary program using GMP must stay
> with the previous version. I find a little bit immoral that
> Maplesoft can get the best of the work of some developers
> without giving anything back.
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