proposed FAQ entries about licensing
David Bateman
dbateman at dbateman.org
Wed Apr 8 07:03:50 CDT 2009
Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> If you want to take advantage of any GPL-covered software, including
> Octave, you need to honor the GPL (of course this means legally comply
> with its terms, but I also think that you shouldn't use it if you
> disagree with it's spirit). GPL protects free software from being
> "proprietarized" in the precise sense you (maybe) look for.
> You can, of course, use any other free software license for your code,
> that doesn't impose GPL's strict copyleft requirements, but then you
> can't make your code dependent on Octave, for instance, by using the
> C++ interface, or by distributing binaries linked against Octave.
>
>
In fact MEX binaries can theoretically be used with both Octave and
Matlab. In practice they can't at the moment but that doesn't change the
fact you can distribute MEX binaries for Octave under whatever license
you want as long as you don't distribute them in such a way that Octave
and the proprietary MEX files become a single product..
Regards
David
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