Re: [Axiom-developer] letting my mud settle

[Mike Dewar]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 12:09:23PM -0500, Bill Page wrote:
> I am not aware of any of Tim's past sins -- only his present
> ones. ;) Building Axiom from sources only, which was apparently
> a requirement imposed by restrictive licensing conditions which
> apparently prevented any of the previously commercial binary
> versions of Axiom to be distributed along with the Axiom source
> code, was certainly a challenge because of the way that Axiom
> had been designed to be "bootstrapped" from an existing running
> copy. But this is no different than the situation with most
> compilers and in particular GNU C (gcc).
Just for the record this is not true.  Arthur Norman offered to provide
an open-source version of CCL to the project which would have allowed
you to build and distribute a Unix version of Axiom from the original NAG
sources without any modifications.  I provided copies of the Axiom
product to several people on the list so you would have had no problem
bootstrapping the first open-source versions from the NAG code.

Eliminating the need for a running Axiom was a good thing to do, but if
anything forced you to do it it was probably the decision to develop on
GCL rather than CCL.

Cheers, Mike.

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