Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: gcl-2.6.8pre on MAC OSX 10.2

[Andrey G. Grozin]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> root <address@hidden> writes:
> | At the time clef, hyperdoc, graphics, etc were written we were using
> | X10 (not the house wireless, the pre-X11 windows) on 6MHz PCs. These
> | ideas were invented within the group to solve problems, not because
> | we wanted our own copies.
> I suspected they were invented to solve problems.  Thankfully, we are in
> 2006 now.  readline has been around for more than a decade.
> I'm trying to understand what would a barrier to stop the homegrown
> clef (which from my experience is source of frustration) and use a
> standard readline.
We cannot do this, unless we change the license of Axiom to GPL.
Remember the story of clisp? RMS has forced the author of clisp to change 
his license to GPL, because it used (and still uses) readline, which is 
GPL (not LGPL) (in spite of the fact that this author claimed that 
readline is optional).

In fact, the current Axiom distribution falls under GPL anyway, because 
gcl is built with several GPL parts (including readline, but not only); 
this is (correctly!) stated in Camm's .deb package.

Andrey