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From: | Philip Nienhuis |
Subject: | Re: Contribution to Octave as a PM |
Date: | Thu, 06 Feb 2014 21:02:32 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 SeaMonkey/2.22.1 |
Julien, Julien Hamilton wrote:
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
<snip>
> Yes it's always a challenge when you want to improve a software, making it > more "corporate", but with staying with the basic principles. I was > thinking about the fact that Octave offers functions to connect to the > nonfree software Microsoft Excel. What exactly do you mean by that? Philip Hi Philip, I mean that according to the free software mouvement we should avoid using *any* nonfree software. The fact that Octave offers an interface to Excel can be see by some people as a contradiction to this principle. Don't you think?
(Your counter question could be more precise :-) )- Sure I agree that some people think so; I can even follow their reasoning. It *is* somewhat contradictory, but only w.r.t. to that alleged aim of "the free software movement". However: - No, I agree only partly with that opinion or aim. While sympathetic, it's simply impractical for many users.
To me, "free" is also about freedom to choose what software or combinations of software to use. Or would you think are we more free if we are limited to only <fill in your favorite definition of "free" here> software? *That* would sound contradictory to me.... IMO it is up to users to decide what to use, and not to me or anyone else to limit or take away other people's *legal* choices and options.
After all, not even the GPL forbids to *run* a mix of proprietary and "free" software - it limits *distribution* of such a mix. Excel (at least my old 97 version) doesn't come with a ban to use it in combination with free SW.
AFAICS Octave is legally at the right side here - it doesn't mix free and nonfree SW, nor is it dependent on the latter. The ActiveX stuff used for the Excel interface can be used to interface to LibreOffice as well (I have that working here). That "some people" think something there is still *morally* wrong - to me that's an opinion that I respect and value. No more, no less.
Philip
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