That's the big question: what is the IP status?
So Nathaniel and I asked, and the blog post author, Steve Eddins,
took the time to answer :
Nathaniel and Pierre—Thanks for your interest in the newparula colormap. * Parula is the end result of a creative design
effort over an extended period of time. I am pleased that you
find it so appealing. The colormap is, however, MathWorks
intellectual property, and it would not be appropriate or
acceptable to copy or re-use it in non-MathWorks plotting tools.*You might look at other sources of high-quality colormaps. I havelisted some in my technical paper on rainbow colormaps, published
earlier this month on mathworks.com.
So they claim the IP. Next question is: is this claim valid, and I'm
not a lawyer to answer it. I suspect that the answer could be
country specific. The only things that bother me in this IP claim, is the status of
all the plots produced with this colormap. They are in a sense a work, am I right ? So the question becomes : does Mathworks owns IP
right for all these plots ?!
Pierre