Re: USING Octave in a commercial environment

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 25 March 2011 13:46, Luke M <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> ygramul wrote:
>>
>> Thank you for the detailed replies, Jordi and John. That clears up a lot
>> of questions I had.
>
> I've gotten quite a bit of pushback at my engineering firm when I suggested
> replacing a portion of our Matlab usage with Octave.  The prime issue, I'm
> told, is corporate responsibility:  if we make a mission-critical decision
> based on results from a Matlab analysis that turn out to be wrong through no
> fault of our own, we might seek damages from The MathWorks.  On a related
> note, we'd have to be absolutely certain that Octave provides the same
> answers.

People have an expectation that money=responsibility, and this may or
may not be true. Octave's license, in SHOUTY CAPS, says that there is
NO WARRANTY, etc. It looks like the Mathworks' license says
essentially the same.

But you can hold individuals responsible through development and
support contracts, and clearly outline the responsibilities in those
contracts. There are several individuals willing to do contract work
for Octave, myself included (although I'm currently involved with one
right now), and perhaps sometime soon we will have an Octave
Foundation if you want a more organisational structure. If that's the
kind of money=responsibility that your company wants, you can get it
both from Mathworks and from Octave developers. Actually, I'm not sure
if the Mathworks sells support contracts besides their license, which
evidently tries to deny any responsibility, and who knows if that's
enforceable; you might end up being able to successfully sue them
anyways. At any rate, don't forget to tell your company that you can
still give Octave money, and quite possibly even less than what
however many Matlab licenses are worth, and which don't give you the
corporate responsibility you seek.

- Jordi G. H.