>
>Wink, wink, nod, nod.
>
>---
>tail $AMBERHOME/AmberTools/LICENSE
>
> The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your
>program
>into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you
>may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications
>with
>the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General
>Public License instead of this License. But first, please read
><http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html>.
>---
>
>And note that we are put into this position of saying
>"ohh, we didn't know that users would actually (illegally)
>link the fftw3 (that we legally distributed) with our proprietary
>programs"
>by lawyers:
>http://fftw.org/faq/section1.html#nonfree
Bless the MIT lawyers for this... Although that said MIT as a pretty
sketchy history when it comes to understanding what is free, public
domain, what isn't etc. Just look the Aaron Schwartz case for example.
As an aside the whole thing is a complete hodge podge anyway. For example,
UCSD (which just got it's very first CFO btw, sigh...) only permits use of
the BSD license. So every line of 'free' code in AmberTools that was
written at UCSD is covered under some BSD license and not LGPL etc,
regardless of what is written in the header of the files in that directory
etc etc blah blah blah. This is what the University Lawyers require -
however, if one asks to meet with said lawyers to obtain training in all
the complexities of different licenses etc, as well as advice etc,
something that is actually required for the research staff to perform
their jobs effectively, it is never possible to meet with them. They are
always busy... I think it might be correlated in some way with the
difficulties of obtaining lunch time tee-times at Torrey Pines.
So, who really knows what the various status of all the licenses is in
this quirky mess. I gave up trying to follow and understand all that long
ago.
As for the requirement that the user 'modify' the code to link to FFTW -
doesn't the user do that anyway? - The configure script asks them if they
want to download and apply updates - they say yes, that then results in
the code being modified. An alternative is just have the configure script
prompt the user if they want to use FFTW - tell them to type a '1' to
include it and a '0' to exclude it. That value can then be inserted into
the configure script / config.h with a simple sed and that way the user
can have been judged to have 'modified' the code to permit it's use. Seems
simple enough to me.
All the best
Ross
/\
\/
|\oss Walker
---------------------------------------------------------
| Associate Research Professor |
| San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| Adjunct Associate Professor |
| Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry |
| University of California San Diego |
| NVIDIA Fellow |
|
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk |
http://www.wmd-lab.org |
| Tel: +1 858 822 0854 | EMail:- ross.rosswalker.co.uk |
---------------------------------------------------------
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Received on Thu Oct 16 2014 - 13:00:02 PDT
