Hi everyone, for those who are not aware of it, there's currently a "non-free" section in octave-forge for packages that are: under a non-free license themselves, or that link to non-free libraries. Currently we have 2 packages in that section (spline-gsvspl and gpc) and last week a new submission was made, octMOSEK. This package is wrapper for the MOSEK library which is not free (both in the libre and gratis sense of the word, not even for educational purposes).
As a free software project, it's questionable whether we should support this. I understand there's points in favor of both actions and I believe to understand both sides. Would be great if the community voiced his opinion about it so that we can make a decision about the future of this section. I didn't had to give much thought to this kind of things until now, there's some grey areas to it, and so Ill try to sum what I see from each side. 1) we are a free software project we should not be supporting/advertising non free software, specially thin wrappers around a non-free library 2) the point above feels specially true when the package is developed by the company that has the rights to the non-free package. It feels like an ugly way to circumvent the GPL and use the community to support their own interests 3) even if we are not actively developing these packages, in the end it will be the octave-forge devs that will receive bug reports for them, have update the site for new releases, etc 4) since we are not developing these packages, when they become broken after a new octave-release, changes on the libraries, etc, it's the name of octave-forge that will be associated with outdated/buggy software 5) octave packages can, and do exist, outside octave-forge so it's not like we are condemning them into oblivion However, 1) non-free as been part of the octave-forge project since the very beginning and so it is part of the original project objectives 2) the code of the packages is actually free software. That is independent of what it links or wraps itself around 3) currently non-free libraries can later become free and compatible libraries (free) can appear so those packages would work fine with them 4) in the SVN repository those packages are already in a separate section which should already be sending a message 5) more code under GPL is better than less code under GPL My personal opinion is to remove the non-free section. While I understand that these packages are free and under GPL, they are currently completely useless without non-free software. It feels to me like the octave-forge maintainers would be being used by the owners of such libraries to support their software. I don't like that feeling and I'd rather spend time working on parts of the project that would fortify free software. Yes, the packages themselves are free which is good but just because they are not hosted in octave-forge doesn't mean they can't exist, distributors of such libraries can host the packages on their own sites. Also, users of such libraries would have got the library from them in the first place, they would know where to find the packages, and octave-forge is not a place to advertise the existence of non-free software. I hope to hear a lot in the following days about this. Would be great if everyone gave his opinion. Carnë Draug ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
