Re: [OctDev] Octave-forge packaging

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Apr-2005, Dan McMahill <address@hidden> wrote:

| I usually avoid the GPL vs BSD license flamewar, but, by 'non-free'
| here its really 'non-GPL'.  Certainly BSD licensed software is free,
| but the GPL would seem to prevent use of BSD licensed plug-ins.

No.  The BSD license (the newer one, without the advertising clause)
is perfectly compatible with the GPL.

| But the reality is that sometimes the effort of writing an octave
| interface to non-GPL software is 1% of the effort of replacing the
| other tool.  An example would be:

The effort required is not the test that matters.  What matters is
whether the resulting binary can be distributed under terms that are
compatible with the GPL.

| In general, I think the plug-in licensing ideas here are unfortunate.
| I could easily envision a company which already provides a matlab mex
| interface to one of their products wanting to release an octave mex
| version too.  The amount of extra work for them is minimal and it may
| make some of their customers happy.  What it does is prevent people
| who may want to use octave and even contribute improvements from
| using it if they're tied, due to the GPL no less, to using matlab.

Rather than blaming the terms of the free software licenses, I
consider this to be a problem with the non-free software licenses.

jwe