Re: Private company and code salvation / story and comments

[Levente Torok]

On Tuesday 30 September 2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:54 AM, David Bateman
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Thomas Weber wrote:
> >>
> >> Am Sonntag, den 28.09.2008, 01:55 -0700 schrieb dbateman:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Frankly, for wider commercial acceptance of Octave I believe its
> >>> necessary
> >>> for Octave to define an API for compiled code that allows commercial
> >>> distribution of the code. Never the binaries as they would link against
> >>> liboctave and liboctinterp and so fall under the GPL of those libraries,
> >>> but
> >>> still an LGPL API to Octave would be greatly appreciated,
> >>>
> >>
> >> Such an interface would be a lawyer bomb; just imagine the linkage to
> >> other libraries under GPL, that link with Octave (FFTW comes to my
> >> mind).
> >>
> >
> 
> 
> > I agree which is why I've always said API and not ABI. That is the source
> > code of the user and not the binary compiled and linked to Octave, which at
> > the point of the linking becomes subject to the GPL. There is nothing to
> > stop me from distributing a package now with the source of a mex-file that
> > acts nicely with the Octave pkg command under whatever license I want as
> > Octave does not control the mex API. Though that is stupid as Octave will
> > always be inefficient using this API as it reflects the internals of Matlab
> > itself. So the Octave community is effectively saying to any developer of
> > non GPL code that you're better off writing for Matlab... Is that the
> > message we want to pass?
> >
> 
> Well, maybe we do. It's true, after all.
> One of the key points of GPL is providing advantage for other
> developers of GPL-compatible software. That's how GPL differs from BSD
> (or LGPL etc). That's the "viral nature" of GPL (quoting W. Gates).
> And that's precisely the case we're talking about now: GPL developers
> have the advantage of oct-file API, while non-GPL developers don't.
> The GPL is doing here just what it's supposed to do. I say, if we
> (community) are unhappy with it, trying to trick the GPL is stupid
> (and may not work legally well); we just need a different license.
> Just to clarify my personal position, I'm quite happy with this
> situation, and I don't want to substitute GPL for another license.
> Though I would probably honor the community's decision and arrange
> re-licensing of all my contributed sources if needed.
> 

Let me give you an example. 
We have a product (  a service) that used liboctave for a year or so.
The product along with the company was sold to a big service provider which 
made us to skip
from octave to matlab.
In case of a LGPL licence, I could have convinced my managers  much much easier 
to 
provide financial support to Octave rather than purchasing matlab. And this is 
what we did.
Purchased a matlab. There was no other way.
On the other hand, I see a possibility to support it on a regular basis but 
this caused me a trouble.
Furtheremore,  working close to academic institutions, I can also convince 
friends
to provide minimal support from grants for octave.
However, the lump sum cannot near the magnitude that is needed to save John 
position.

>From my perspective, the form of a foundation for this purpose would be much 
>much 
more easily adopted everywhere.

One more thing, I would consider is success of scilab.
I believe what makes scilab very much apetizing is the GUI (with its well 
integrated help system) 
and licencing terms and condition.
Scientific guys usually find everything, that is apart from pure math, somewhat
excessive thing and painful hence better to avoid.
I personally like CLI interface but this is not the thing I would want to give 
a 
good mathematician to work with.

Lev

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