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.