inconsistent condition numbers from cond, det, inv functions

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 8, 2008, at 6:13 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  8-Feb-2008, David Bateman wrote:
>
> | If possible, though it really isn't now, I'd be all for stripping  
> all
> | individual authorship and copyright from individual file in Octave
> | (John's included) and state in the manual that the contributors hold
> | joint copyright to all of Octave, and then this would no longer be  
> an issue.
>
> I'm not opposed to a change like this.  Believe it or not, it has
> occurred to me that as we have more people making significant and
> sizeable contributions, it makes less sense for the startup message to
> have my name only.  Recently I added "and others" though that still
> doesn't seem quite right.

fwiw, I am in complete support for such a change.

> I don't see that there should be a problem to changing the copyright
> to be inclusive of all contributors (no contributor loses a copyright
> claim on any file where they were originally listed, though now others
> also have a claim).  In any case, given that the code is distrubted
> under the temrs of GPL and written by many people, it seems to me that
> we essentially have this situation now anyway.  For example, my
> understanding is we can't change the license or even add an exception
> clause in addition to the terms of the GPL without agreement from all
> copyright holders.  Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so this could all be
> complete nonsense from a legal point of view.
>
> One practical problem would be how to legally state that all the
> contributors hold the copyright.  I know that the R group made a
> change like this at some point, and R now starts with a message that
> says
>
>  Copyright (C) YYYY The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
>
> As I understand it, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing is an
> actual legal entity of some sort, not just a name they made up.  You
> can find their charter here: http://www.r-project.org/foundation .


There have been many functions "adapted" (for octave-forge etc) over  
the years. I would presume there would be a legal problem with  
stripping the individual's copyright and adding a collective copyright  
(?)

Ben