I'm guessing that when you're the BDFL of Octave you can negotiate a compromise.

The Mathworks is not our friend. They view Octave with disdain, and our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab.

I think jwe would be miserable working at TMW. It would be the ultimate insult to his life's work.

Why such acidity towards Mathworks? I've use Matlab decades ago with someone elses licensing so I don't really know the details.

"our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab."

That's a really negative way to put it. Isn't Scilab a viable Matlab alternative as well. Are you hoping to block people from using that as well? What about Intel's fortan compiler...

The point is, it's much more approachable to describe things in positive terms rather than negative when all you are essentially doing is offering a product in a not-ruled-by-monopoly market.

The reason for the acidity is quite simple: we believe non-free software like Matlab to be unethical. You should not be restricted by a license manager, there should not be any restrictions on who you can share your software with (Matlab's license says you can only share Matlab's own source code with other Matlab users), you should have complete access to the source code (Matlab hides a lot of juicy secrets in its hidden source code, such as the exact algorithm of its backslash operator, or virtually everything interesting in its image processing package). You deserve better than this. You deserve free software.

This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed.

As for Scilab, they don't have quite the same aim as Octave. They don't aim to implement the same language so you can take your Matlab scripts away from Matlab, without change. They have a compatibility layer that does it partly, but there is still a need for implementing the same language. Imagine if the only way to run Javascript or Python was to sign away your rights to some company.

Freemat is a bit more comparable in aim to Octave, but it has a smaller contributor pool.

>This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed.

And why NumPy/SciPy will overtake Octave, if it hasn't already.

I wish them all the best. Numpy is free software. As long as people stop using Matlab and non-free software to get do scientific computing, I don't care if they use Octave or Numpy or R or Julia. We're all on team free software. Julia and R are also GPLed, and they seem to be doing well.

As long as people need to run Matlab scripts without Matlab, there will be a need for Octave.

Julia isn't GPL, it's MIT. Currently includes a few GPL libraries in the default distribution which makes the overall thing GPL, but that won't be the case for much longer. You can leave those libraries out for a no-GPL build.

Point is, Julia is by default GPLed and the GPL is not The Cancer That Is Killing Julia (or Octave or R). Without the GPL, Julia doesn't have FFTW, Suitesparse, or GMP.

GPL is a major issue for a number of commercial users. It prevents us from shipping MKL as an option, for example.

A lot of people can get by just fine without FFTW or SuiteSparse (they aren't dependencies of everything written in the language, so don't belong in the standard library), and GMP is LGPL so not quite as problematic. But people do want to use a programming language to deploy applications, including proprietary commercial ones. Doing that in R or Octave isn't really possible because of the GPL, and that hurts the prospects of commercial backing (as does being pretty bad languages for developing software, but that's a separate matter).

Perhaps it would be better to put it as "is to make sure people who are already stuck with Matlab scripts don't have to deal with Mathworks".

Scilab is already open source, and GCC has a Fortran backend, so I don't see how those are relevant

No way.

I don't know what the relationship between MathWorks and Octave is, but probably the last thing MathWorks wants to do is give the creator their biggest competitor access to their trade secrets and proprietary information.

Maybe as humans we should be thinking bigger than things like secrets

Well, maybe if you convince the MathWorks guys of that they'll hire this dude, but otherwise he's not going to get to do both things.