No subject

[magictour at free.fr]

Neil wrote:

 >Well, i don't want to encourage people to
 >download the whole database, for several reasons.
 >
 >(it's copyright, it changes frequently, etc.)

it's copyright ? Where and by which law ?
What,when submitters will claim copyright of their submitted sequences ?
They might also dislike, that the whole database
is copyrighted by you or ATT or whoever.
Maybe someday you decide to shut down your pages, then the
whole database will be lost, since nobody can put the whole
thing on another server due to copyright problems ?!?

Then I'd say, let's immediately start another similar database which is
not copyright and thus has better chances to survive the next
-say- 1000 years... Or at least until the computers can (re)do the whole
thing alone.


 > it changes frequently
OK, but the same is true for lexika, newspapers, telefone books, math-papers,...
Yet the actual versions are sold.
Also, other than these, the OEIS can only be extended, not invalidated
or partly deleted or rewritten when parts become less interesting due
to changes in science,style,politics,religion...



 >can you name any other database on the web that will
 >allow you to download the whole thing?

"download the whole database" gave about 400 hits with google.
http://commonground.mines.edu/download.cgi
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/o18data/
http://65.109.104.188/DBExcel.html
http://www.logos.it/pls/dictionary/linguistic_resources.cap_5_11?lang=en
http://bme.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/researches/detail/concreteDB/user/registration.asp
are from the 2 first pages.



IMO you denigrate your own work/idea by comparing with other
(commercial) databases and making it subject to man-made trivia
such as local copyright laws.
OEIS is somehow "philosophical", supernatural, the code of math/logic,
more fundamental than the universe itself.
And you have the fortune to live exactly in those 50 years (out of
billions) where computers were developed to first calculate these
numbers.
And you were the first to establish such a OEIS. Don't you feel that
it should remain universal and free available and not subject to
copyright and competing databases to be developed each one with
its own copyright and lawsuits among them which sequence first
appeared in which database etc. ?


 >i don't mind people downloading one of the chunks, but
 >i don't want to make it too easy to grab the whole thing!

there is no way to prevent this, once you have the chunks you can
put them together. And no need to prevent this, IMO.
Sell CDs with the whole thing to make it easier !
(before others will do it)

 >Neil Sloane

Guenter Stertenbrink, sterten(at)aol.com

Guenter Stertenbrink