Re: Matlab central and octave

[David Bateman]

Gabriel Peyré wrote:
> Dear Nicola,
>
>   
>> The people of the octave-help list mailing and the active octave  
>> users have built octave-forge that wants to provide toolboxes for  
>> octave, and also as many functions as possible to complement  
>> octave. We are looking forward to collect even more such examples  
>> and reuse, whereever possible, the code that would run in matlab  
>> and with, hopefully small enough adaptations, well in octave too.
>>     
>
> Concerning the licencing issue: for now I am not ready to move to GPL  
> licence. You can however redistribute the different toolbox or the  
> separate files that can be found on matlab central, as long as the  
> copyright is not removed from the souce files.
>
>   
Hi Gabriel,

Sourceforge, where octave-forge is hosted, requires that all code that
is hosted there must have a valid open-source license. They are very
liberal in what that means, as long as the code can be freely
distributed, so a GPL license is not necessary. However, if someone
wants to upload the code to sourceforge, then I don't think the above
statement is clear enough, as it doesn't discuss derivative works or
types of use..  It also doesn't protect you from someone taking your
code into a commercial product without either consultation or recompense
to you.. I think a statement like

<quote>
You can however redistribute the different toolboxes or the separate
files that can be found on matlab central for both commercial and
non-commercial use, as long as the copyright is not removed from the
source files. Derivative works, in addition to the above, must also
distribute their source code under similar conditions.
</quote>

would be better. Anything less and either the code shouldn't be uploaded
to sourceforge under their terms of use, or it doesn't protect you
against abuse of your code..

Regards
David

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