Re: Who uses Octave?

[Michael Goffioul]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Julien Salort <address@hidden> wrote:
> Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> - Hardware I/O: I'm not sure how easy it it to talk to simple analog and
>>> digital I/O cards but
>>> haven't heard a lot of success stories yet. The main OS of my students is
>>> Windows, other OS are <
>>> 10% I would guess.
>>
>> This has been mentioned a couple of times before. The main problem
>> there seems to be the cross-platform issue.
>
> I use  Octave in my  daily work to  communitate with several  NI devices
> (GPIB card, DAQmx card) using  NI-VISA and NI-DAQmx libraries. I've been
> running  my  code   on  Mac  OS  X,  Windows  and   now  Linux.   It  is
> cross-platform, as  long as National Instruments  provides libraries for
> your preferred  platform: no  problem on Windows,  almost no  problem on
> Macintosh,  tricky  on Linux,  except  if  you  stick to  the  supported
> distributions (I  had it  work with Scientific  Linux 6.1 but  failed on
> Debian Squeeze).
>
> I'd be willing to publish my code. I'm just not sure if there is a legal
> issue: as  I understand it, a  GPL program is distributed  in binary and
> source forms.  However,  if you link against a  proprietary library, the
> resulting binary cannot be distributed with a GPL license.  Am I right ?
>
> Then my problem is the following:
> - I have no problem to publish the source code of my oct files
> - Once compiled,  they link against Octave libraries  (GPL) and National
>  Instruments libraries (proprietary).
>
> What license should I choose ?

Your source code must use a GPLv3-compatible license. Because it is
intended to be linked against NI library, which is not
GPLv3-compatible, you can't distribute resulting binaries. OTOH
nothing prevents you from distributing sources only.

But as a GPL project, we obviously prefer a fully GPL-compatible
solution, if there's any. Also you code could not be hosted on
octave-forge, as we recently decided to host only GPL-compatible
packages, so you'd have to host your code somewhere else.

Michael.