Re: Private company and code salvation

[David Bateman]

Thomas Weber wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 08:55:11PM +0200, Oscar Bayona Candel wrote:
>   
> > Hi all two questions:
> >  
> > Fisrt, in the next two or three years I want to create my own company. 
> > I want,if it is possible, to use octave as a one of my programming
> > languagues, the other is Ox.
> >  
> > My first question is, how much it will cost?
> >     
>
> Nothing.
>
>   
> > it is possible to use it freely?
> >     
> Yes. 
>
>
>   
> > Second, if I want to protect a code (an m file) (temporaly) how can I make it 
> > in octave?
> >     
>
> You can not. 
>
> .m files are clear text (just like PHP, Python, Perl and whatever
> scripting language).
>   
Please note that in reality for a dedicated person matlab can't either 
as p-code is just a pre-parsed code and so it should be relatively easy 
to work back from the p-code to the m-code itself. The only hurdle is 
you don't know the structure of the matlab parse tree. If Octave 
implemented p-code it wouldn't even have that protection as the Octave 
parser code is open source as well. If you really want to protect it a 
bit better write it as a mex-file or oct-file and only distribute the 
binary. But John's interpretation of the GPL is that that is not allowed.


> > That is I want that my programm will be used freely but not the way I
> > have programmed.
> >     
>
> You know, people on this list spend several hours each week (and that's
> a conservative estimate) of their free, unpaid time developing Octave.
>
> How about we start charging for the .m files?
>
>   

Well, working for a private company myself I kind of understand the need 
to keeping some code secret. Though if you make money off Octave the 
polite thing to do would be contributions of code or Money back to the 
Octave community. I'd say your best thing to do in this case is not to 
try and hide the code, itself but place the algorithm (that is really 
what you are trying to protect) under and NDA with the person you are 
sharing with.

Regards
David

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