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Re: proposed FAQ entries about licensing


From: Judd Storrs
Subject: Re: proposed FAQ entries about licensing
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 16:53:19 -0400

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 4:16 PM, David Bateman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>>
>> OK, I believe you, but I just don't understand the reasoning, then.
>> There is also the (albeit slight) possibility that the FSF people
>> missed some important detail. I see the link to liboctave et al.
>> hard-wired in the produced mex file and that seems to me to make it a
>> derivative work of Octave. There's certainly no liboctave in Matlab,
>> so it's apparent the executable is built to be linked to Octave.
>> Maybe I don't understand the part "plugin interface that is not
>> GPLed".  Is there any part of Octave's sources not covered by GPL?
>> I think mex.h carries the GPL preamble, doesn't it?
>
> You but the point is that it is theoretically possible to build a single mex
> binary that can be used with both Octave and Matlab. In fact it is even
> possible to build a mex file without Octave or Matlab installed on the
> machine. So yes mex.h has a GPL license, but the API it defines is not
> specific to Octave.

To follow up and maybe clarify. If you were to compile the mex file
using Matlab instead of octave, the resulting binaries would not
contain links to liboctave or any other part of octave. They would use
Matlab's mex.h in this case. So distribution of the compiled binaries
would not depend on octave's license at all.

--judd



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