[Discussioni] [David Grundberg <davidg a cs.umu.se>: Re: [OT]: Mathworks fighting the GPL]

[Francesco Potortì]

Questa è passata sulla lista help-octave.  Octave è un interprete in
larghissima parte compatibile con Matlab, un programma per il calcolo
numerico molto usato in ambito scientifico e ingegneristico.  Mathworks
è la ditta che distribuisce Matlab.

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:14:58 +0100
From: David Grundberg <davidg a cs.umu.se>
Subject: Re: [OT]: Mathworks fighting the GPL
In-reply-to: <9543b3a41002101455u76732008r8e22e057cd2dc58a a mail.gmail.com>
To: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh a gmail.com>
Cc: Octave-help <help-octave a octave.org>
X-Seen-By: Mailfromd 3.1.3

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> Apologies for the offtopic chatter, but I just noticed this as I was
> trying to look for Emacs's Matlab mode to see if I could get some
> ideas for Octave mode. It appears that the Mathworks only allows the
> BSD license on their servers now, which affects much free software
> under other licenses (in particular GPL) that they were hosting.
>
> It's difficult to find exactly what happened and how because they seem
> to have spread the word about this relatively secretly by email to
> people with code on their servers, but they do have a FAQ:
>
>      http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/FX_transition_faq.html
>
> This happened July last year.
>
> I don't know about anyone else, but I'm deeply disturbed that
> Mathworks is now actively fighting against copyleft.
>
> - Jordi G. H.

The permissive licensing is bad for the contributor to the benefit of 
Mathworks (or anyone else making proprietary software). People should 
decline using matlabcentral, it's in their own interest. This draws to 
memory the X Consortium, which demanded permissive licensing from it's 
contributors so that the software could be restricted at will.

David
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