Re: Octave and licensing issues

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Nov-2004, Paul Kienzle <address@hidden> wrote:

| The Open Source Initiative has a definition of open source software
| and a list of approved licenses:
| 
|       http://www.opensource.org/

Without changes to Octave's licensing, what matters is whether a
license is compatible with the GPL, not that it is on the list of
approved open source licenses (which includes a lot of
GPL-incompatible licenses)

If we change Octave's licensing, I would probably be more inclined to
allow linking with any software no matter what the license, provided
the external code only uses a specific plug-in interface (i.e., not
giving access to all of the internals of Octave unless the external
code is also licensed under the terms of the GPL).

(Apparently, open source/free software licenses are like IRC clients:
everyone feels the need to write their own...)

jwe