On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
<address@hidden> wrote:
I
don't there is much good will here. Deliberately excluding copyleft
and deliberately excluding software that may also work on Octave does
not seem like good will to me. I assume malice, not idiocy, because
they're sneaking this under the users' noses, and they are directly
attacking free software such as Octave.
I think Mathworks is just trying to act as a sheppard to save their flock from the licensing morass so their users can focus on what matters--using their Mathworks products productively. I personally am extremely happy they purged the scourge of academic-use only licenses from their site. But I think the end-user experience is great--people can just go there and not have to scrutinize the licenses of individual components--that's what Mathworks is after. By standardizing on BSD, they've been able to shed the old license bickering (mostly via a selection effect--the licenses preferred by license bickerers aren't welcome). Mathworks users can just go to File Exchange and use stuff, they don't have to chart and analyze the licenses of all their submodules.
Now, if Mathworks were to actually enforce the ToS under the interpretation you're proposing (if they have, I'm not aware of it) then I'd be outraged and I'll supply the pitchforks and torches. But they haven't actually done anything mob-worthy yet (other than cast out GPL-licensed packages years ago).
--judd