Private company and code salvation

[David Bateman]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>> To me the question is not one of whether a company would finance such an
>> API. Given that the Octave community would accept such an API, which is
>> still not certain,
>>     
>
> maybe, but I don't see why we should object...
>   

Acceptance is subject to the degree to which community members believe 
the GPL should be the license to all software. However, the harder 
question is "how can you have an LGPL, or other license, to a set of 
libraries using the GPL?" and in particular given that the code has 
existed for a long time, we can't realistically modify in anyway the 
Octave license. So we need to figure out a legitimate means of having 
this API/ABI to Octave. As I said the mex interface is one such as 
writing code for such an interface means that the code is not 
specifically for Octave.


>> Someone has to go and ask for it, and give good reasons why giving that
>> money to the open source project is good for the company doing it.
>>     
>
> Yes, precisely. In fact, once a company realises that they would
> benefit from using Octave (say, instead of Matlab), and that the only
> obstacle is the missing LGPL API, it will probably be clear to them
> that investing money to get that last obstacle removed is a good idea.
> On the other hand, if the LGPL API is already there, they will just
> use it.
>   
The idea of a paid support company is not the write code on request as 
such, but to supply on call support for when companies have an issue to 
address. This can give a company the confidence to use Octave as they 
know that there is some one, somewhere that they have paid that will 
address any questions, issues or bugs that they have.. This is not a 
small issue in getting many companies to accept a particular piece of 
software to be part of their tool chain. So the existence of the API 
makes that paid support position easier.

Hey, if can also get someone to pay for it to be written then why not.

> I don't understand the laws much, but IMHO a company based in Europe
> would be in less danger as most Mathworks patents seem to be US only
> and in general laws in EU are more strict about software patents.
>   
So you cut off any possibility of generating a profit in the US market, 
as doing business in a country makes you subject to their laws. There 
goes John's job at such a company :-)

Cheers
D.


-- 
David Bateman                                David.Bateman at motorola.com
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