Re: [OctDev] Reading NI TDMS files

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Dec-2007, Ryan Rusaw wrote:

| I've written some Eclipse plugins for Octave development, that I've
| licensed under the GPL-incompatible EPL. The Eclipse framework (DLTK)
| I've based my code on allows for external debugging engines to be
| integrated if the speak a documented network protocol, DBGP
| (http://xdebug.org/docs-dbgp.php).
| 
| I've also written a DBGP based debug engine for Octave, that I've
| licensed under the GPLv3, as it certainly is a derivative work of
| Octave.
| 
| It was my understanding that I can only distribute them separately.
| Do you mean that I am mistaken and in fact I can't distribute the DBGP
| debugger at all?

Distributing components separately doesn't allow you to avoid the
terms of the GPL.  From your description above, it sounds like what
you are doing is OK, but I'm not familiar with these tools, so it
would help if you could describe more clearly exactly how the Eclipse
plug-in and the DBGP based debug engine are connected (to each other
and to Octave).

Parts that link with Octave (either dynamically or statically, to form
a single executable program) must have GPL-compatible licenses.
Communicating over a network protocol is not linking, so if
your Eclipse plug-in is only linked with Eclipse and not Octave, and
only communicates with Octave over a network connection (so that
Octave is running in a separate process) then the plug-in may have any
license you choose (though I would hope it would be a free software
license).

jwe