Thank you Andrew for this very detailed account. It's clear that the details are complicated so let me take a higher level view.
The intention of all the BO contributors of code and specs is to make them available, and re-usable without inappropriate restrictions. There is no intention to restrict fields of endeavour or people or organizations. Many of the BO components are 10 or more years old (CML was published in 1999 and CDK and (Open)Babel and Jmol are older). The licences, code, etc were written at that time and many have survived to this day not throughy design but because it's a difficult maintenence problem. Most BO contributors would probably put higher priority on fixing bugs , refactoringand developing interfaces than managing the interoperability of licences. To summarize, therefore, Andrew and others have identified that we have a licence maintenance problem. (I am not concerned here with the definition of "Open" other than that we use things called OpenSource licenses because they provide what we think we want.). If there is an agreed approach to licensing for BO software I will be positive about adopting it but of course I don't have the details. I think it needs to be done. But it will not be trivial and it will take considerable time. If someone wishes to volunteer to lead this activity I think it would be highly appreciated. For myself I think it's useful to list the principles that I would like to see in licensing BO material. That's how OpenSource and OpenAccess have proceeded (not without intense discussion). Maybe we can then find licences that are more-or-less usuable over the wide range of BO software. But I suspect we shall have to have more than one approach. For now, **are there any BO activities that are seriously held back by the licences we have**. I appreciate there may be a lack of clarity but untilo now no-one has mailed me or the BO about licence concerns and says it is holding them back. For example OSCAR uses the Artistic licence - it's widely used and incorporated in commercial products but no-one has raised the problem. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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