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Re: Private company and code salvation


From: dbateman
Subject: Re: Private company and code salvation
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:55:37 -0700 (PDT)

Charles,

Its all well to quote the GPL but the situation is a little less clear cut
than a purely GPLed program..You of course can't distribute an m-file with a
mathworks copyright, and if you distribute an m-file of Octave its under the
terms of the GPL, but that wasn't what was being talked about. The question
was about obscuring  the code of a "user"  written m-file.

I can write an m-file that targets Matlab and just incidentally also runs
under Octave. There are no restrictions on the distribution of user written
m-files for Matlab, and so Octave can make no such claim either. The same
can not be said about oct-files as the source code of an oct-file addresses
the Octave API and can only be linked against the Octave libraries to make
it work. Therefore, the only interpretation of the Octave GPL license in
this case is that user written oct-files must be distributed under the GPL.
However, Octave has a mex-file interface and I can write compiled code to
the Matlab mex API and distribute the source code under any license I want,
and the user is free to compile and use that source code under Octave. This
is of course a fairly ridiculous situation in that we are forcing users that
wish to distribute compiled code for Octave to write to the Matlab API which
Octave is of course less efficient with.

Frankly, for wider commercial acceptance of Octave I believe its necessary
for Octave to define an API for compiled code that allows commercial
distribution of the code. Never the binaries as they would link against
liboctave and liboctinterp and so fall under the GPL of those libraries, but
still an LGPL API to Octave would be greatly appreciated,

D.

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