Further on MEX

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi,
  I cannot comment on points 1-3, but

søn, 04 01 2009 kl. 15:27 +0530, skrev Aravindh Krishnamoorthy:
> Also on a related note:
> 4. [matter-of-taste] I'd have liked a liboctavemex.so (with mx... MEX
> functions) released under LGPL, but I'm not sure how strong supporters
> of software-freedom and GPL the Octave team is. Would you pls. comment
> on this?

I think people have different feelings about this. The GPL encourages
freedom much more than the LGPL, which IMHO is a good thing. But LGPL
would have some practical benefits, such as being able to link with
libraries that are Free, but not GPL compatible.

That being said, I doubt that a move to LGPL is possible as it would
require getting permission to relicense code written by many
contributors. This is a tedious and time-consuming task, that also would
require legal expertise. I doubt that anybody would want to work on such
a task, even if it was decided that LGPL would be good. Also, Octave
links to quite a few libraries that are only GPL, which makes Octave
"inherit" this license.

Søren