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Re: Antitrust: Commission opens proceedings against MathWorks


From: Michael D Godfrey
Subject: Re: Antitrust: Commission opens proceedings against MathWorks
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:55:46 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.1

On 03/01/2012 09:05 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
As it is, I
specifically do not use Matlab myself and ask other people to check
results on Matlab for me in order to adhere to a clean-room reverse
engineering protocol. I think Ben, Rik, or others might also benefit
with such a thing.
This is an interpretation of clean-room engineering,
which I think does not really apply in the case of Octave.  Octave does
not claim to be a reverse-engineered copy of Matlab (thankfully).
It is not unreasonable to be this conservative, but for myself I feel free
to use Matlab including in order to find out how it differs from Octave.
I have no doubt that I have the legal right to do this, regardless of any
claims in the Matlab license.

However, the EU case addresses a different issue: does Matlab have
the right to refuse a license to a customer for some specific reason.
This has long been a complex question.  The presumption is that all
customers must be treated "equally" in order to prevent unfair
discrimination.  Of course, if the potential customer intends to use the
product for illegal purposes  refusal may be legal.  The EU has
generally been supportive of claims that achieving interoperability is
important to competition as shown in the MicroSoft case, and thus is
not on the face of it illegal.

But, I do not think that this affects Octave development much.  We can pretty
easily find out what we need to know about Matlab without any questionable
behavior.  The harder part is deciding what to do about it!

Michael


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