Re: How to use mathematica and sage ?
William Stein
> Hi William,
>
> If we set up a sage notebook server on a machine with mathematica
> installed, and let the general public sign up for accounts,
> then the general public will be able to run mathematica through the
> sage browser. And without having looked at the license
> agreement for our mathematica installation, I can be pretty sure that
> this is something Wolfram will have tried to prevent.
> I imagine other people will have pondered this, and I wonder what the
> current thinking is about it.
Wow, from this point of view, Sage suddenly seems to have the potential
to be a threatening copyright circumvention device or something, like
bittorrent. I definitely hadn't thought of things in quite that way before.
Anyway, I'm certain that doing what you describe above
would be a violation of the Wolfram license
agreement, and I am careful never to do it (e.g., sagenb.org only
has free software available). Maybe -- I do *not* know for sure --
you could do this if instead you let only people who are authorized to use
that copy of Mathematica anyways get accounts. E.g., at UW we have a site
license for Mathematica, so all students, staff, and faculty at UW
could legally use Mathematica severed via a Sage notebook using
campus-owned equipment.
Alex Clemesha -- you used WebMathematica a lot, and the Sage notebook
was your vision -- do you have any clarifying remarks to add above?
-- William
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
alex clemesha
On Dec 12, 2007 10:00 PM, pgdoyle <> wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> If we set up a sage notebook server on a machine with mathematica
> installed, and let the general public sign up for accounts,
> then the general public will be able to run mathematica through the
> sage browser. And without having looked at the license
> agreement for our mathematica installation, I can be pretty sure that
> this is something Wolfram will have tried to prevent.
> I imagine other people will have pondered this, and I wonder what the
> current thinking is about it.
Wow, from this point of view, Sage suddenly seems to have the potential
to be a threatening copyright circumvention device or something, like
bittorrent. I definitely hadn't thought of things in quite that way before.
Anyway, I'm certain that doing what you describe above
would be a violation of the Wolfram license
agreement, and I am careful never to do it ( e.g., sagenb.org only
has free software available). Maybe -- I do *not* know for sure --
you could do this if instead you let only people who are authorized to use
that copy of Mathematica anyways get accounts. E.g., at UW we have a site
license for Mathematica, so all students, staff, and faculty at UW
could legally use Mathematica severed via a Sage notebook using
campus-owned equipment.
Alex Clemesha -- you used WebMathematica a lot, and the Sage notebook
was your vision -- do you have any clarifying remarks to add above?
I think the bittorrent analogy is perfect in this case:
You can use it for 'good' (i.e. distribute copies of Sage when
sagemath.org is get slammed by tons of traffic)
... or you can use it 'illegally', by violating copyright ... with
bittorent you can get virtually any piece of copyrighted digital media you want.
If you open up a Mathematica kernel to anyone on the web, you are using
the notebook to do something illegal, which should not be done.
The sage notebook is free for everyone, so utimately this is hard to control.
Alex
Jason Grout
> On Dec 12, 2007 10:00 PM, pgdoyle <> wrote:
>> Hi William,
>>
>> If we set up a sage notebook server on a machine with mathematica
>> installed, and let the general public sign up for accounts,
>> then the general public will be able to run mathematica through the
>> sage browser. And without having looked at the license
>> agreement for our mathematica installation, I can be pretty sure that
>> this is something Wolfram will have tried to prevent.
>> I imagine other people will have pondered this, and I wonder what the
>> current thinking is about it.
>
> Wow, from this point of view, Sage suddenly seems to have the potential
> to be a threatening copyright circumvention device or something, like
> bittorrent. I definitely hadn't thought of things in quite that way before.
>
> Anyway, I'm certain that doing what you describe above
> would be a violation of the Wolfram license
> agreement, and I am careful never to do it (e.g., sagenb.org only
> has free software available). Maybe -- I do *not* know for sure --
> you could do this if instead you let only people who are authorized to use
> that copy of Mathematica anyways get accounts. E.g., at UW we have a site
> license for Mathematica, so all students, staff, and faculty at UW
> could legally use Mathematica severed via a Sage notebook using
> campus-owned equipment.
>
According to the license agreement at
http://www.wolfram.com/terms/MathematicaLicenseAgreement.pdf , the
prohibited uses include:
"All uses of the Software and other elements of the Product not
specifically stated in the Permitted Uses section of this
Agreement are prohibited, including without
limitation:"
...
"h. allowing access to the Product by any user other than Licensee,
including without limitation, access to the Product via
a web server which is only allowed pursuant to a valid webMathematicaTM
license agreement;"
(you might check to see if the text is the same in your license
agreement---I believe the above is for a single-user license).
I asked my campus Wolfram representative once if I could have a wiki
that would allow students to run mathematica calculations (we had a
site license and Mathematica was on all the student labs). After he
talked with Wolfram, I was told that I would need a webMathematica
something-or-other and that I wasn't allowed to provide web access using
regular mathematica. Incidentally, that's about when I started
discovering the Axiom wiki and started learning more about Sage :).
Of course, if there is doubt, we ought to have the questions clarified
by an official representative of Wolfram.
-Jason
William Stein
Wow, this makes it seem like doing the following is a clear violation
of the Mathematica license agreement:
sage: notebook()
....
type into the notebook on my computer at localhost:
mathematica('2 + 2')
and press shift-enter.
Pow, I've just used Mathematica "via a web server without a valid
webMathematica TM license agreement"!
If this really is a violation of the license agreement, I would definitely
like to know, so I can put some sort of disclaimer into Sage about this,
and when I demo this feature in a talk I'll have to say "kids, don't try
this at home!"
-- William
Timothy Clemans
because it is being used over the web without webmathematica?
On Dec 13, 10:55 am, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
Jason Grout
> So it is illegal to ssh to a machine with Mathematica and use it
> because it is being used over the web without webmathematica?
Well, technically SSH is not http, but on the other hand, the computer
probably is still a webserver.
[snip]
>>> "h. allowing access to the Product by any user other than Licensee,
>>> including without limitation, access to the Product via
>>> a web server which is only allowed pursuant to a valid webMathematicaTM
>>> license agreement;"
>> Wow, this makes it seem like doing the following is a clear violation
>> of the Mathematica license agreement:
>>
>> sage: notebook()
>> ....
>>
>> type into the notebook on my computer at localhost:
>>
>> mathematica('2 + 2')
>>
>> and press shift-enter.
>>
>> Pow, I've just used Mathematica "via a web server without a valid
>> webMathematica TM license agreement"!
Wow, gee, I never thought about this one. It's definitely a web server
here. You are the licensee, but the wording "without limitation" makes
it sound like it's even forbidden to do this on a single-user license if
you bought the software.
It sounds like we do need some official clarification at this point.
Keep in mind that the other license agreements (like the Network license
agreement) probably have different terms.
-Jason
William Stein
Jason: Could you take responsibility for writing to Mathematica about this?
Then post the response? Feel free to specifically mention Sage.
I'd really like to know if the Mathematica license is really that restrictive.
If so, I want to add a disclaimer about this to keep from getting into trouble.
William
Jason Grout
Sure.