Re: [OctDev] low level I/O (GPIB, USBTMC, VXI11)

[Julien S. <li...@ju...>]

Sergei Steshenko <ser...@ya...>
writes:

> I am wondering what is more amusing:
>
> 1) a puppy or a kitten trying to catch its own tail;
> 2) a cat chasing laser pointer light spot on a wall or a floor;
> 3) GPL proponents shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm not very amused personally. I was wrong to think that Octave was a
good choice for instrument control. I wanted something free because I
didn't want to rely on restricted licenses for my experimental setups:
what happens if the network gets down ? No license server, no instrument
control anymore. That seemed unacceptable to me. That's why I've been
advocating for Octave to several colleagues.

Now I have a bunch of Octave-only code that I can't share with
anyone. If I had chosen Matlab in the first place, I would be able to
publish the code without restriction. This is very paradoxical and I had
not anticipated this problem. I must admit that I should have read
Octave license carefully in the first place. But I wrongly thought that
careful reading of licenses was only necessary when using proprietary
software, because the GPL was meant to protect me, as a user. And I was
happy with publishing my own code under GPL too.

Now I realise that I would not have had problem if I had gone with
Python instead of Octave.  I understand why they have a GPL-phobia now.

But I have several experimental setups that have been tuned with Octave
scripts and switching to Matlab or Python will be too huge a work.
So I'll have to stick with Octave, but with no possibility of sharing
my code publicly.