[Axiom-developer] Axiom meeting at ISSAC

[Bill Page]

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/AxiomPresentAndFuture

took place on Monday July 30 as planned. There was however very little
discussion about Axiom. :-( In attendance where Barry Trager, Steven
Watt, Emil Volcheck, Gaby Dos Reis, Bill Page plus a few other people
from the ISSAC conference that I did not recognize by name. Notably
absent (though attending ISSAC) was Tim Daly. Needless to say that
considerably reduced the possibility of addressing most of the topics
listed in the meeting proposal.

Never the less it was a useful meeting because Steven Watt was
available to discuss the decision to release Aldor as open source on
August 31.

http://www.aldor.org

The new Aldor open source license

http://www.aldor.org/AldorPublicLicense2_0.html

is a modified BSD-style license which contains a "for non-commerical
use only clause" making it incompatible with GPL. This potentially has
an impact on the possibility of using and distributing Aldor as part
of Axiom unless Axiom were to adopt a compatible license, however that
would mean that Axiom would also become incompatible with GPL.

The only solution offered by Steven Watt was the possibility of
providing the Axiom developer with two or three separate downloads and
corresponding source code respositories, e.g. one for each of GCL,
Axiom and Aldor - each with separate and mutually incompatible
licenses. To completely build Axiom from source code then would
require that the developer or user to download the three components
separately and only combine them in the final build. If would be
possible to distribute a binary version of Axiom with Aldor for
non-commercial use-only provided that it was not built using a GCL
version of Lisp.

Obviously discussion of these licensing conditions could get
complicated and technical in a legal sense and not of interest to all
Axiom developers so I would proposed that we continue the discussion
of this issue (if at all) only on the separate axiom-license email
list.

There was also a short discussion of a similar nature about the legal
status of the name Axiom, e.g. is it a trademark or not. The general
conclusion was that if the name still has any status as a trademark it
would very likely be held by NAG. The proposal therefore was to
address this question to Mike Dewar.

There was no discussion about the recent fork of Axiom called FriCAS
except to note that open source licensing allows the creation of such
new projects and that this would also apply to the new release of
Aldor provided of course that it's licensing conditions were met.
Stephen Watt stated that he would "welcome" such a development in the
case of the Aldor project.

Regards,
Bill Page.