On Feb 16, 2010, at 1:43 PM, Andrew Dalke wrote: > On Feb 16, 2010, at 5:21 PM, Andrew Dalke wrote: >> I thought the first version was published in a journal article, and >> for the last 10 years I've not had problems getting the spec. There >> was a period where I had to give them my contact details, but that >> changed years ago. > > In addition, John Barnard in > > Structure Representation and Search, In Encyclopedia of > Computational Chemistry, Schleyer, P. von R.; Allinger, N. L.; > Clark, T.; Gasteiger, J.; Kollman, P. A.; Schaefer, H. F.; Shreiner, > P. R. (Eds.). Wiley, Chichester, 4, 2818-2826 > > wrote: > > Among the formats which, at the time of writing (April 1997), appear > to have some degree of general use, are: > > * The Molfile and associated formats, developed by MDL Information > Systems, Inc., and maintained and supported by them as proprietary > commercial products, but whose description is made freely available > to other developers. > > > then goes on to list PDB, CIF/mmCIF, MIF, CXF, CML, and CEX as other > connection table formats. > > So while Peter Murray Rust wrote: >> MDL were incredibly secretive and possessive about the MOL-file >> format. > > > I just don't see that in the historical record either.
I remember Bill Milne telling me a long time ago that there was some arm twisting done to get the original JCICS paper done, but it whatever the specifics of history (and that was probably 4 ownership changes ago), we have had 15+ years of actual experience with this format and I certainly have had no problems in either getting the specification or freely implementing the specification. It may be different for commercial operations and as I mentioned in the other note, I have never had any desire to modify it. I also have not had any complaints from anyone trying to use the DTP data that they couldn't use their software of choice to read the data. DanZ /******************************************** * Daniel Zaharevitz * Chief, Information Technology Branch * Developmental Therapeutics Program * National Cancer Institute * [email protected] * ********************************************/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
