Legal issues

[Ron Crummett]

Hi -

I was discussing the availability of Octave to a student the other day 
as a viable alternative to MATLAB.  He was intrigued but asked about the 
legality of it - after all, both have a number of functions with the 
same names that perform the same tasks.  While I know that the code 
under the hood is different - at least, Octave code is not pirated from 
MATLAB code - is it copyright infringement that the functions have the 
same names?  I don't believe that Octave is illegal by any means, but I 
am not an expert in legal issues and would like a good explanation to 
give him.

Thanks,

-Ron