Re: Clarification about the octave-gpcl licensing conditions

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Nov-2006, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

| I tend to think that such a change in Octave would be beneficial in many
| aspects, including for fostering the use of Octave in academia.  I have
| already written Octave bindings for the CGAL (www.cgal.org) and the
| Cubpack++ (www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~nines/software/cubpack/) libraries, but I
| am afraid of releasing them, because of the potential GPL infringement.  

I am happy with using the GPL for Octave.  Aside from that, there are
some practical problems to making a change in the license.  First,
there are many people who have contributed code under the terms of the
GPL and who have not assigned changes to me, so we would need to
contact all of them and get approval for changing the license.
Second, Octave links with and includes directly code that is
distributed under the terms of the GPL (various functions have been
adapted from bash (and also I think Emacs) over the years, so we would
need to deal with those parts as well.

jwe