From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed Dec  2 23:43:45 1998
Subject: Commercial use of Octave
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Krzysztof Gozdziewski <chris at astri dot uni dot torun dot pl>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 23:42:21 -0600 (CST)

On  3-Dec-1998, Krzysztof Gozdziewski <chris at astri dot uni dot torun dot pl> wrote:

| please explain me under which conditions is it possible 
| (if at all) to use octave or parts of it (for instance liboctave) 
| in a commercial project. I am not sure of my interpretation of GNU GPL.
| To be more specific: suppose one wants to write a program and use
| in it a library of octave. Are there conditions under which it is 
| possible to sell the executable without its source code?.

If you produce a derived work based on GPL'd code, you must also make
the source code to your application available under terms that satisfy
the requirements of the GPL.  But that doesn't mean that you can't
write commercial applications that are derived from Octave (please
don't confuse `commercial' with `proprietary').

| I think no, but I suppose that the GNU compilers are used to produce
| commercial applications.   

The GNU compilers can be used to compile proprietary applications.
Compiling something with gcc doesn't require you to link in any GPL'd
code.

jwe