Re: Private company and code salvation

[Levente Torok]

On Wednesday 01 October 2008, David Bateman wrote:
> Olaf Till wrote:
> > Maybe I am wrong, but if a company distributes proprietary mex-source
> > code that compiles and runs with Octave, the company must surely claim
> > that this is accidental, and the code is intended for Matlab. If they
> > admit that the code is intended to run with Octave, they admit to
> > violate the GPL. If the company provides funding or other support to
> > Octave (wasn't this the original argument?) in order to keep their
> > code running, how can they claim the code is not for Octave?

> >   
> Strictly speaking yes, but I'd like some sort of clear statement that 
> this is a situation that the Octave developers understand and will take 
> no action against the company in this case. In any case the defend of 
> accidental support of code in Octave is independent of any funding 
> legally and you'd have to establish a causal link between the two in 
> court to take action. I'd say that would be an uncertain thing.

We have not distributed a mex compliant binary code.
We developed a product and run it as a service.
In this case, there is no obligation to distribute sources since we don't sell 
the
product itself. So this was the so called in-house use of our GPL product.
It implies no obligation to distribute the sources.

It must be clear that even if sources was certainly under GPL, the company is 
the copyright 
holder and since has the possibility, if no other circumstances stop it, to 
remove the
status of the sources. Since we didn't linked against any GPL code, there were 
no barriers to do it.
So before the company was sold along with the product,
we made it matlab compliant and removed the legal status to be a proprietary.

On the other hand, being something octave compliant cannot be a source of GPL 
legal issue.
If it would be, FSF could sue all matlab code producers. Even Mathworks can be 
on the spot.

The financial support is completely different issue. Don't mix them.

Lev

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