On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 12:10 +0200, Xavier Amatriain wrote:
I have sometimes seen extensions to the Matlab program that are published under the GPL. That is, a researcher implements some algorithm in Matlab and publishes on his/her webpage under the GPL. My question is: is that even possible? How can a piece of software that requires of something such as Matlab, which is definitely non-Free, using a non-Free language be published under the GPL?
1st question: yes
2nd question: the authors can add an explicit permission to link the GPL'ed program they wrote against some proprietary library or program.
2nd question explored further: if said library or program is something that is part of the proprietary system in question, then there's no need to add an explicit permission. This is _not_ the case of MatLab.
Regards, Rui