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Re: Private company and code salvation


From: Jaroslav Hajek
Subject: Re: Private company and code salvation
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:33:18 +0200

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:54 AM, David Bateman
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Thomas Weber wrote:
>>
>> Am Sonntag, den 28.09.2008, 01:55 -0700 schrieb dbateman:
>>
>>>
>>> Frankly, for wider commercial acceptance of Octave I believe its
>>> necessary
>>> for Octave to define an API for compiled code that allows commercial
>>> distribution of the code. Never the binaries as they would link against
>>> liboctave and liboctinterp and so fall under the GPL of those libraries,
>>> but
>>> still an LGPL API to Octave would be greatly appreciated,
>>>
>>
>> Such an interface would be a lawyer bomb; just imagine the linkage to
>> other libraries under GPL, that link with Octave (FFTW comes to my
>> mind).
>>
>


> I agree which is why I've always said API and not ABI. That is the source
> code of the user and not the binary compiled and linked to Octave, which at
> the point of the linking becomes subject to the GPL. There is nothing to
> stop me from distributing a package now with the source of a mex-file that
> acts nicely with the Octave pkg command under whatever license I want as
> Octave does not control the mex API. Though that is stupid as Octave will
> always be inefficient using this API as it reflects the internals of Matlab
> itself. So the Octave community is effectively saying to any developer of
> non GPL code that you're better off writing for Matlab... Is that the
> message we want to pass?
>

Well, maybe we do. It's true, after all.
One of the key points of GPL is providing advantage for other
developers of GPL-compatible software. That's how GPL differs from BSD
(or LGPL etc). That's the "viral nature" of GPL (quoting W. Gates).
And that's precisely the case we're talking about now: GPL developers
have the advantage of oct-file API, while non-GPL developers don't.
The GPL is doing here just what it's supposed to do. I say, if we
(community) are unhappy with it, trying to trick the GPL is stupid
(and may not work legally well); we just need a different license.
Just to clarify my personal position, I'm quite happy with this
situation, and I don't want to substitute GPL for another license.
Though I would probably honor the community's decision and arrange
re-licensing of all my contributed sources if needed.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz


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