Re: Octave database bindings

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Mar-2008, Xavier Delacour wrote:

| On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 7:36 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| >  I can find license statements for Postgres (BSD) MySQL (GPL) and
| >  sqlite (Public Domain) but I don't see a quick link to the same for
| >  ODBC.  What are the license terms for ODBC and how is it linked to
| >  Octave?  Simply using an automatic way of generating the interface
| >  code (by using SWIG) doesn't allow you to sidestep the terms of the
| >  GPL.
| 
| ODBC is simply an interface.
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_Connectivity

OK.

| unixODBC is one implementation of it (the one I'm using,
| incidentally). It is distributed under GPL/LGPL. See
| http://www.unixodbc.org.

Perhaps you should point to this instead of the Microsft page?

| In the case of vendors that don't have open licenses (eg Microsoft),
| could we not simply use a more liberal license than GPL just for this
| package? Is anything linked to Octave in any way required to be
| source-available?

If you link something with Octave to form a work based on Octave, then
it must be possible to distribute the entire resulting work under the
terms of the GPL.  It doesn't matter whether those parts are
distributed seprately or together.  I believe this is clearly stated
in sections 5 and 6 of the GPLv3 (particularly section 5(c)).

jwe