Using octave runtime in a commercial product

[Eduardo Fuentetaja]

Dear Octave team,

 

I haven’t been able to find an answer to my question on the Octave wiki or forums. Let me give you some context: at my company (Agnitio, we are in the voice biometric business) we use Matlab extensively for our prototyping. Recently we have been experimenting with the possibility of packaging Matlab code and call it directly in our commercial products. This is accomplished by means of the “Matlab compiler” that is able to pack .m functions into native libraries, which are executed by a Matlab runtime (the MCR, that can be distributed freely to our customers). This experiment hasn’t been very successful due to compatibility problems with some third party libraries that the Matlab runtime uses. Being a closed-source product, we don’t have many options there.

 

Octave looks like a good alternative to Matlab: able to compile it from the sources we’d have a greater deal of control over third-party dependencies. Well, it seems very promising to me. The issue with Octave is that it’s distributed under GPL license and being such a complex and wordy license I’m not sure if this license allows us doing what I have in mind: write some code in Octave, compile Octave as a library that will execute the Octave code under demand, distribute this library in binary format as part of our software products and sell commercially these products. Well, is this possible with Octave or is it not? I’d like to have your confirmation without continuing any further.

 

If anyone is interested we can contribute with any modifications we made to Octave code.

 

Thank you so much for your answer.

 

Kind regards,

 

                Ed Fuentetaja

                Agnitio – SW development team

 

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