Re: Including Octave in NCLab

[Luke M]

Pavel Solin wrote
> 
> Hello,
>   thank you very much for the prompt reply. Allow me a brief
> explanation why NCLab is not completely free, as you suggested.
> 
> NCLab is free for you and any other individual user and we even
> pay for the cloud resources that you use. But NCLab can't be
> completely free for institutions whose resource utilization is much
> heavier. We are not bored millionaires, unfortunately. But if you
> compare the price o NCLab to any other software such as
> Matlab (where resources are not included), the subscription fee
> for NCLab is embarassingly small.
> 
> I am not sure whether the Octave team has any plans to enable
> free use of Octave in the cloud, but this is exactly what we want
> to do, with the kind permission of Octave developers. This will
> make Octave and other softwares included in NCLab easier to
> use, so everyone should benefit from that. Again - individual users
> will not pay anything for using Octave or other tools in NCLab.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Pavel
> 

I am not a lawyer.

I'm fairly certain that the situation you've described is exactly the
Application Service Provider "loophole" that was rejected for GPLv3 and
resulted in the creation of the Affero GPL.  That is, if Octave were AGPL,
you would have to open source your application to allow your users access to
Octave running on your servers.  Since Octave is GPLv3, however, you are
free to run Octave on your servers and give users access to it.

I believe the only piece that still stands is that any modifications you
make to the Octave source code would have to be released in such a way that
the build running on your servers can be easily reproduced.

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