Re: licensing question

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Feb-2006, Michael Creel wrote:

| Actually, I'm the author of the code, which is in octave-forge. Someone 
| asked about how they might use my code with Matlab. I just wanted to 
| give an accurate warning of what's acceptable if they decide to port the 
| code. My code is used to create .oct files, and includes oct.h. The port 
| would create .mex files (?) This is dynamic linking and sharing of data 
| structures, right? So, as I understand it, this person could distribute 
| ported source code, but not the resulting .mex files.

Again, the answer probably depends on the precise details.  If your
code relies on liboctave to do its work, so that you would have to
link liboctave and Matlab (in a MEX file) to make your code function,
then I would think that the liboctave license (plain GPL without
additional exception clauses) does not allow that.

If you are distributing sources that form an interface to liboctave
that is intended to be compiled and linked as above, then I would
claim (as the FSF has) that this use is also infinging.  As I
understand it, expecting the user to perform the compilation and
linking step is not a valid means for avoiding the terms of the GPL.

jwe



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