Re: Terms of use Mathworks file exchange

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 7 May 2012 15:29, Rhys Ulerich <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Jordi,
>
>> This isn't paranoia. They did both things at the same time (purge the
>> GPL and add more restrictions) so they obviously did this
>> intentionally. Whether they plan to use these legal weapons is another
>> matter, but they certainly built them, and I'm not comfortable with
>> them having their finger on the trigger, not matter how nice and moral
>> they may appear now.
>
> This thread suggests anything submitted to File Exchange ceases to be
> FOSS (or at least it'll take cash to untangle the legalities of it).
> Presumably a community site for Octave and/or ML scripts far from the
> corporate lawyers would be worthwhile.
>
> Forgive me if this is a FAQ, but is there an Octave/FOSS analog to
> File Exchange?

I've started this, a while ago:

    http://agora.panocha.org.mx/

It hasn't really gotten off the ground, but it's already somewhat
useful as a pastebin that actually understands the Octave language,
with e.g. # for comments and "double quoted" strings. If you know
Python and/or Django, the source is here:

    http://inversethought.com/hg/agora/

Octave-Forge is sometimes used as a general dumping ground for all
sorts of code that could be useful for Octave, but I wish we could be
more rigourous about its use and only admit there code that is highly
relevant. Octave-Forge has a maintenance problem, because we get
drive-by code dumps and the person who gives us that code never
maintains it. And as you know, thus spake the master programmer[1]:

    Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to
    be maintained

> I am aware of Octave-Forge.  I'm thinking of a place, like File
> Exchange, to pass around useful routines and snippets which aren't
> likely worth wrapping up into a complete Octave-Forge package.

Right, Agora is supposed to be precisely this. It would ease the
burden of maintainership of Octave-Forge, allow us to raise the bar in
Octave-Forge and keep it very low in Agora, and we could have any code
under any free license. I would be very happy to have your patches.

- Jordi G. H.