Re: [Maxima-discuss] Permission to distribute FPS.mac with Maxima under terms of the GNU General Public License?

[Stavros M. <mac...@gm...>]

Distributing LPS under the GPL may or may not be compatible with the
license he has granted Maplesoft.
It is possible that Maplesoft is OK with GPL licensing because their
proprietary competitors cannot incorporate GPL code. Or maybe not.
In any case, we don't know the exact terms of his deal and we are not
lawyers, so I don't think we are competent to give him advice on what
license to distribute his code under.

          -s

On Thu, Jul 6, 2023 at 1:09 PM Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...>
wrote:

> Hi Bertrand, sorry for not replying, I've been distracted by various
> things. I've taken the liberty of cc'ing maxima-discuss since others
> will be interested in this discussion.
>
> I'm glad that you want to distribute FPS.mac, and I don't see any
> problem. I understand from what you wrote that you have a specific
> agreement with Maplesoft which allows distribution with Maxima -- that
> is very good for Maxima.
>
> About licensing, it will help a lot if you put a specific statement in
> the FPS.mac file and any others that you want to distribute, stating
> that you release the file under terms of a specific license (which I
> recommend to be the GNU General Public License). Here is a statement
> which you can adapt if you like.
>
> /*
>  * copyright 2018 by Robert Dodier
>  * I release this work under terms of the GNU General Public License,
> version 2.
>  */
>
> Although I am not a lawyer, I believe it is important to put such a
> statement on files because it enables anyone who receives the file to
> know what they can and cannot do with it.
>
> You do not have to choose GNU GPL as the license; as the author, you
> can choose any license you like, although GNU GPL is the same as the
> rest of Maxima, and therefore makes it straightforward to combine your
> work with the existing Maxima files and distribute the whole bundle.
>
> About the means of distribution, I see different possibilities, which
> are all workable. You can say what you prefer in this respect.
>
>   (1) Committing FPS.mac and associated files to the Maxima revision
> control repository (Git) and distributing the files as part of the
> Maxima package.
>
>   (2) Committing FPS.mac and associated files to the maxima-packages
> project on Github
> (https://github.com/maxima-project-on-github/maxima-packages).
>
>   (3) Committing FPS.mac and associated files to a new or existing
> Github project, other than maxima-packages, or on another
> project-hosting site.
>
>
> Thanks for your work on FPS, and all the best.
>
> Robert
>
>
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