Re: Private company and code salvation

[Thomas Weber]

Am Sonntag, den 28.09.2008, 01:55 -0700 schrieb dbateman:
> Frankly, for wider commercial acceptance of Octave I believe its necessary
> for Octave to define an API for compiled code that allows commercial
> distribution of the code. Never the binaries as they would link against
> liboctave and liboctinterp and so fall under the GPL of those libraries, but
> still an LGPL API to Octave would be greatly appreciated,

Such an interface would be a lawyer bomb; just imagine the linkage to
other libraries under GPL, that link with Octave (FFTW comes to my
mind).

Maybe it's possible, maybe it isnt; however, Sergei's hint about ALSA
made me aware of a different point. Say a company ships some commercial
code, built against a convenient-licensed API. Now, for whatever reason
(speed, bugs, ...), we change the API, incompatibly. What will happen?

I guess that the company will tell the customer to just stay with the
old version. That means 2.1.50 again, the version that just doesn't die.

        Thomas