Re: GUI in Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 14 July 2013 23:00, Bruno Cartusia <address@hidden> wrote:
> Is xoctave worth the expense ($50)?

I consider Xoctave to be a GPL violation. It is clearly derivative
work of Octave,[1] but doesn't provide its source code. I don't
recommend getting too comfortable with Xoctave while it remains
non-free, because if you run into trouble with it, nobody can fix it
but its original authors. We have seen examples of people being
trapped by non-free[4] GUIs for Octave before. [2] Despite the GPL
violation, I don't think it's worthwhile trying to enforce compliance,
since the development version of Octave has a much better integrated
GUI. Hopefully this will eclipse Xoctave once it's released, and I see
no evidence that Xoctave is enjoying any popularity.

If you are too impatient for our next Octave release which will have a
GUI (I don't expect it will take longer than a few months), and you
don't want to help us test it by building it from the development
sources, you can try other free[4] GUIs in the meantime. DomainMath
IDE is one option[3], which people have reported to be usable. Another
option is QtOctave, which although it's abandoned, it still mostly
works with the latest Octave stable release. You will have to get a
QtOctave from a third-party distributor, but for example, it's still
packaged for Debian and Ubuntu. Finally, if you don't mind trying
Freemat instead of Octave, Freemat itself comes with its own GUI and
has ported a number of Octave m-files for its own use.

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.

[1] To test this: could it work at all without Octave? Could it also
be, say, a Matlab or Freemat GUI? If not, it's derivative work.
[2] e.g. 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/problems-getting-GUI-Octave-to-work-properly-tp4654323p4654367.html
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/domainmathide/
[4] As in freedom.