Re: Private company and code salvation

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:21 PM, David Bateman
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>>>
>>> To me the question is not one of whether a company would finance such an
>>> API. Given that the Octave community would accept such an API, which is
>>> still not certain,
>>>
>>
>> maybe, but I don't see why we should object...
>>
>
> Acceptance is subject to the degree to which community members believe the
> GPL should be the license to all software. However, the harder question is
> "how can you have an LGPL, or other license, to a set of libraries using the
> GPL?" and in particular given that the code has existed for a long time, we
> can't realistically modify in anyway the Octave license. So we need to
> figure out a legitimate means of having this API/ABI to Octave. As I said
> the mex interface is one such as writing code for such an interface means
> that the code is not specifically for Octave.
>
>
>>> Someone has to go and ask for it, and give good reasons why giving that
>>> money to the open source project is good for the company doing it.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, precisely. In fact, once a company realises that they would
>> benefit from using Octave (say, instead of Matlab), and that the only
>> obstacle is the missing LGPL API, it will probably be clear to them
>> that investing money to get that last obstacle removed is a good idea.
>> On the other hand, if the LGPL API is already there, they will just
>> use it.
>>
>
> The idea of a paid support company is not the write code on request as such,
> but to supply on call support for when companies have an issue to address.
> This can give a company the confidence to use Octave as they know that there
> is some one, somewhere that they have paid that will address any questions,
> issues or bugs that they have.. This is not a small issue in getting many
> companies to accept a particular piece of software to be part of their tool
> chain. So the existence of the API makes that paid support position easier.
>
> Hey, if can also get someone to pay for it to be written then why not.
>
>> I don't understand the laws much, but IMHO a company based in Europe
>> would be in less danger as most Mathworks patents seem to be US only
>> and in general laws in EU are more strict about software patents.
>>
>
> So you cut off any possibility of generating a profit in the US market, as
> doing business in a country makes you subject to their laws. There goes
> John's job at such a company :-)
>

That's the price, obviously. OTOH, pretty many US companies have
offices in EU (while the converse is, I believe, less true), so if
they want support, they can still get it by making the deal there.


> Cheers
> D.
>
>
> --
> David Bateman                                address@hidden
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>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz