Re: licensing question

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Feb-2006, Michael Creel wrote:

| When I say "port", I mean modify the program to compile using Matlab, 
| but in no way using Octave, dropping oct.h, etc.  But the modified 
| source would need to be GPL'd, since it would be derived from the 
| existing source, which is GPL'd.

Yes, but if you are the original and only author, then you can add an
exception to the license for your code (and your code only) that
allows this kind of use, assuming that is what you want to do.

| I haven't thought about it much, but it seems to me that it would be 
| unusual, not to say perverse, to write source code that needs both 
| Octave and Matlab to compile.

Suppose I have a large computation that requires classes from
liboctave.  It might be difficult to rewrite that to avoid the use of
liboctave, but someone might want to run the code in Matlab as well as
Octave, for whatever reason.  I think that it would depend on the
details of the code whether the liboctave license prohibits this or it
falls in a grey area that might be considered OK.

jwe



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