Hello, it's been a while. I'm tinkering, in my spare time, with Freemat and I am looking to see which parts of Octave Forge can benefit Freemat. Right now, as a test, I want to copy orth.m into Freemat. It's a simple function with a simple implementation and only one parameter that always means the same thing.
I noticed that the copyright header says something like "This file is part of Octave..." Now, I don't want to usurp Octave's good name by claiming that Freemat is part of Octave, so what we're thinking of doing is to prepend a note, something like: "This file, which is distributed with Freemat, was originally copied from Octave; original copyright notice follows." Does that sound good?
A second issue is that for some files, I will probably be making some changes. Some changes are necessary for compatibility, for example, Freemat doesn't understand comments that start with ##, and expects comments to start with %. Other changes are improvements in functionality and compatibility with MATLAB, for instance, the roots in the version of Octave that came with my cygwin, crashed on roots([1e-200 1e200 1]), while the versions in MATLAB and the upcoming Freemat, have no problem with it.
The Freemat developers have expressed the desire to have these improvements merged back into Octave-Forge. As a hobbyist, I'm not sure that I want to babysit both the Freemat side of things and the Octave side of things, but if someone wants to pick up the slack on the Octave side (or if someone else from Freemat volunteers), I would be happy to provide patches for Octave Forge.