[Aldor-l] Compiler development

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> Notwithstanding that IANAL probably applies to everyone likely to 
> comment here, I would like to know the opinions of the participants
> in this email list concerning the proposed use of SVN external
> sources. Does this "technical solution" really provide a way to avoid
>  incompatible license restrictions?

Suppose you open up a SVN repository MyAldorImprovements where you
exclusively include patches to the current source repository

https://aquarium.aldor.csd.uwo.ca/svn, Rev. 23
or
https://svn.origo.ethz.ch/algebraist, Rev. 24

(no code from these repositories ever is included in
MyAldorImprovements). The only thing that connects MyAldorImprovements
with the Aldor (APL2) repositories would be a SVN external property.

But with or without such an external property, who can forbid you to put
your sources at MyAldorImprovements under GPL?

It is the user who actually compiles everything together to make the
merge of the sources and produce the final binary. I don't see any legal
problem. Anybody else?

Such a scenario would at least make it possible for people who want to 
improve Aldor to go on with a free license for the additional stuff even 
if Aldor itself is only semi-free.

> For example, would including such an external definition in the
> FriCAS and/or OpenAxiom repositories that points to a separate Aldor
> repository really make it more convenient to retain two separate
> incompatible licenses for panAxiom and Aldor? Certainly it would be
> nice to do one checkout, configure, and make to get a fully
> operational version of panAxiom+Aldor, but ...

The extra download can also be made through a Makefile, there is no need 
to use SVN:external. See 
http://fricas.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fricas/branches/aldor-interface/src/aldor/Makefile.in?view=markup&pathrev=296 
lines 143-183.
(But I hope that for those few .as files that I now reference in that 
fricas branch, Aldor.org and NAG agree to release them under mBSD soon.)

The problem is that the a binary must be distributed under APL2. If 
something like MyAldorImprovements uses GPL there cannot be any 
distribution of a binary, since it would violate both GPL and APL2.
Everyone would have to make his own version of Aldor.

Very inconvenient indeed. But isn't it more important to enable all 
those who want to contribute to Aldor under a free license to do so by a 
free "extension" repository like MyAldorImprovements?

Ralf