Geogebra license
William Stein
The Geogebra download page says "You are free to copy, distribute and
transmit GeoGebra for non-commercial purposes. Please see the GeoGebra
license for details." The license itself on code is according to the
license:"GeoGebra's source code is subject to the GNU General Public
License:" So in fact you cannot restrict its use to non-commercial
purposes, since that would be a violation of the GPL. Could you
please clarify?
-- William
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
Dr. David Kirkby
"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
So it is not permitted to follow 99% of the GPL, but make the odd
modification here or there as one sees fit.
Dr. David Kirkby
it says:
1) GeoGebra Installer, Language and Documentation Files License:
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
2) GeoGebra Application and Source Code License:
GNU General Public License
So it looks to me that some things are licensed under one license, and
some under another, I don't see anything legally wrong with them doing
that. OpenSolaris for example is licensed under at least 3 different
licenses (Common Development and Distribution License, OpenSolaris
Binary License and Public Documentation License.) None of it is
licensed the GPL.
Whether or not the dual licensing of GeoGebra makes it a practical
proposition to use the source code in Sage, and do a re-write of the
installers and documentation is another matter.
If (and I can't be bothered to check) autoconf and automake are used
to generate a makefile, which has an "install" section, then I would
argue that as long as you run autoconf and automake yourself on the
configure.ac and makefile.am, then you have not taken the installer.
The installer has been generated by you from source code. (Personally
I think configure.ac and makefile.am would be considered the source
code.) Given they often need changing for Sage, writing them from
scratch might be a good idea anyway.
If the installer is written as a shell script, which one runs then it
would not be permissible to use it.
The only significant issue to me would be whether or not it is
feasible to re-write the documentation from scratch. If the
documentation is small, it might be quite feasible. If the
documentation is large, it is probably not worth the effort.
Dave
William Stein
> it says:
>
> 1) GeoGebra Installer, Language and Documentation Files License:
> Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
>
> 2) GeoGebra Application and Source Code License:
> GNU General Public License
>
> So it looks to me that some things are licensed under one license, and
> some under another, I don't see anything legally wrong with them doing
> that.
Geogebra code is licensed GPL according to their page. But they
also claim that Geogebra is free "for noncommercial use only".
These two statements are mutually incompatible as I mentioned
before.
> Whether or not the dual licensing of GeoGebra makes it a practical
> proposition to use the source code in Sage, and do a re-write of the
> installers and documentation is another matter.
>
> If (and I can't be bothered to check) autoconf and automake are used
[...]
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, though I wish you could
"be bothered to check", since then your comments would
be even more valuable.
-- William
Dr. David Kirkby
On Jul 20, 12:57 pm, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Geogebra code is licensed GPL according to their page. But they
> also claim that Geogebra is free "for noncommercial use only".
> These two statements are mutually incompatible as I mentioned
> before.
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts, though I wish you could
> "be bothered to check", since then your comments would
> be even more valuable.
it to tell you something you already knew. With hindsight, it would
have been better to downloaded and checked myself.
However, I later did download it and can't see anything that I would
consider "source code" at all - only java class files which are
compiled from source. So it makes even less sense now. Unless the
source is somewhere else, in a file I've not found, or I'm mistaken in
some other way, there is no source code available.
Dave
William Stein
<david....@onetel.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jul 20, 12:57 pm, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Geogebra code is licensed GPL according to their page. But they
>> also claim that Geogebra is free "for noncommercial use only".
>> These two statements are mutually incompatible as I mentioned
>> before.
>
> I did not see that. I would agree, they are incompatible.
It's here I think:
http://www.geogebra.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=71&Itemid=55
>
>> Thanks for sharing your thoughts, though I wish you could
>> "be bothered to check", since then your comments would
>> be even more valuable.
>
> I assumed you knew yourself, so did not wish to waste time downloading
> it to tell you something you already knew. With hindsight, it would
> have been better to downloaded and checked myself.
>
> However, I later did download it and can't see anything that I would
> consider "source code" at all - only java class files which are
> compiled from source. So it makes even less sense now. Unless the
> source is somewhere else, in a file I've not found, or I'm mistaken in
> some other way, there is no source code available.
>
I have to admit that I'm also pretty ignorant about what's really
going on with Geogebra. I just got some offlist emails
from the project director, but the situation as he described
it seems even more dubious than I expected, so I've written
back for clarification, since I'm probably misunderstanding him.
Once I get clarification I'll post something.
-- William
William Stein
> it to tell you something you already knew. With hindsight, it would
> have been better to downloaded and checked myself.
>
> However, I later did download it and can't see anything that I would
> consider "source code" at all - only java class files which are
> compiled from source. So it makes even less sense now. Unless the
> source is somewhere else, in a file I've not found, or I'm mistaken in
> some other way, there is no source code available.
The source code is only available via CVS from sourceforge.
See:
http://www.geogebra.org/source/program/
Looking one sees that geogebra ships with and fundamentially
depends on the GPL'd Java CAS called "Yacas". This is why
Geogebra itself must be GPL'd.
-- William
William Stein
After emailing with Markus Hohenwarter -- director of Geogebra -- and
looking around at the code, I get the impression that the Geogebra group is
very well meaning and a great group of people doing some wonderful things
in math education. Unfortunately, it appears they are also possibly violating
the GPL in order to ensure complete control over their project (which
is something
the GPL doesn't allow). I want to emphasize that I think they are well meaning
and aren't doing this out of any sort of evil intentions, and of
course I strongly
applaud their putting a lot of effort into open source math software and math
education, much of it likely voluntary.
I think that Geogebra has to be GPL'd because it fundamentally depends on
the java version of the GPL'd yacas library (yacas = yet another computer
algebra system). On the other hand, it seems that the Geogebra folks purposely
criple Geogebra by making the build system, language files (?), and
documentation
all non-GPL compatible. As a result it seems that one can't use
Geogebra under the
terms of the GPL. This might be a violation of the GPL.
(Note that I wrote "seems" and "might" in several places above, since I'm
not really certain of anything. I could be just plain wrong!)
So I don't think (optional) integration or support of Geogebra from
Sage is a wise move right now. I very much hope the situation with
Geogebra changes asap. I.e., in my opinion, the Geogebra group should
either make the Geogebra distribution fully GPL'd or they should replace
YACAS by another non-GPL'd component and switch to a license
other than the GPL that allows them to restrict redistribution in the
ways they see fit.
-- William
Ondrej Certik
Like by some BSD based component? :)
Is the end result good for open source alternatives to Ma*?
Ondrej
Ondrej Certik
>> Sage is a wise move right now. I very much hope the situation with
>> Geogebra changes asap. I.e., in my opinion, the Geogebra group should
>> either make the Geogebra distribution fully GPL'd or they should replace
>> YACAS by another non-GPL'd component and switch to a license
>
> Like by some BSD based component? :)
>
> Is the end result good for open source alternatives to Ma*?
Oops, sorry I clicked send before I finished -- I wanted to add if you
think a nonfree end program that nevertheless uses opensource
components is holding back the opensource math programs development.
Ondrej
Dr. David Kirkby
> Hi Sage-Devel (cc: Markus),
>
> After emailing with Markus Hohenwarter -- director of Geogebra -- and
> looking around at the code, I get the impression that the Geogebra group is
> very well meaning and a great group of people doing some wonderful things
> in math education.
I've had experience where people breach the GPL out of ignorance, and
not intent. I knew of a scientific calculator which run on a PDA which
was sold only as an executable. When it started up, it said it used
code from the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). But the GSL is GPL'ed
code. I let the developers of the GSL know, who basically advised the
developer of the calculator they could not use their code, but
suggested non-GPL'ed alternatives. It all ended ok, and the GSL
develpers were kind enough to send me a copy of the book on the GSL.
> Unfortunately, it appears they are also possibly violating
> the GPL in order to ensure complete control over their project (which
> is something
> the GPL doesn't allow). I want to emphasize that I think they are well meaning
> and aren't doing this out of any sort of evil intentions, and of
> course I strongly
> applaud their putting a lot of effort into open source math software and math
> education, much of it likely voluntary.
can't blame them wanting to do that if they have put a lot of work in,
and would rather see some benifit for their efforts. I've personally
produced GPL'ed software, but would not wish to provide extensive
support for commercial users for zero cost. Hence I've sold support.
If that is their intension by crippling the code, perhaps you can
point out that making money by selling support to commercial users is
completely possible under the GPL. People earn their living from
supporting things like Linux, Apache and many other bits of software
that have GPL or similar licenses. I think Sun are a pretty good
example, who now give Solaris away, have made all they can open-
source, but still make a lot of money by supporting Solaris. As do
plenty of other people.
The GeoGebra developer's do not need to cripple code in order to make
money from commercial users. GeoGebra's incorporation into Sage might
well give them a larger user base and so a larger potential market to
sell support to.
Dave