Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave
by tavert on Monday February 13, 2017 @11:28AM
(#13636485)
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).
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).