On Monday 18 October 2004 13:47, Xavier Amatriain wrote:
If someone sends me a piece of Matlab code I cannot run it! What am I supposed to do?
In my opinion, we will never have truly Free software if we don't try to build Free hardware. I mean, the design of the CPUs we use is copyrighted/patented/tradesecret/whatever. If we want to run Free software, we are forced to get a non-Free CPU. But now some people started designing Free chip designs, so I hope we will soon have Free hardware in the future. See: http://www.opencores.org
The problem you describe is real and I think it's similar to the "Java trap". The java trap is that you write a GPL program for java, but java is not Free, so in the end you end up being controlled by whoever provides the java implementation. But some programmers understood the problem so they build Free java alternatives.
About MatLab, I think that the best solution is to organise a group for programmes in order to improve Octave or write a new MatLab-compatible Free package.
If you think about it, you will see that Free software was always developed this way. We didn't have any Free operating system at first but then GNU/Linux came out of the effort of thousands of programmers around the world, because people want to be Free. In the same way, if many programmers and engineers agree to work together, we can create anything Free, including mathematics software and computer hardware.
Oh, and a clarification: When I talk about Free hardware I mean the copyrightable/patentable electrical-logical design, not the actual hardware. The real hardware needs, of course, a factory in order to be build, but the design can be just drawn on a piece paper (or a CAD file) :)