|
From: | Michael D Godfrey |
Subject: | Re: Antitrust: Commission opens proceedings against MathWorks |
Date: | Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:55:46 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.1 |
On 03/01/2012 09:05 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
This is an interpretation of clean-room engineering,As it is, I specifically do not use Matlab myself and ask other people to check results on Matlab for me in order to adhere to a clean-room reverse engineering protocol. I think Ben, Rik, or others might also benefit with such a thing. which I think does not really apply in the case of Octave. Octave does not claim to be a reverse-engineered copy of Matlab (thankfully). It is not unreasonable to be this conservative, but for myself I feel free to use Matlab including in order to find out how it differs from Octave. I have no doubt that I have the legal right to do this, regardless of any claims in the Matlab license. However, the EU case addresses a different issue: does Matlab have the right to refuse a license to a customer for some specific reason. This has long been a complex question. The presumption is that all customers must be treated "equally" in order to prevent unfair discrimination. Of course, if the potential customer intends to use the product for illegal purposes refusal may be legal. The EU has generally been supportive of claims that achieving interoperability is important to competition as shown in the MicroSoft case, and thus is not on the face of it illegal. But, I do not think that this affects Octave development much. We can pretty easily find out what we need to know about Matlab without any questionable behavior. The harder part is deciding what to do about it! Michael |
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |