On Nov 15, 2009, at 2:15 AM, George M. Sheldrick wrote:
My attempts to cover this by writing grant applications were
(with the exception of a couple of EU grants) singularly unsuccessful,
one DFG attempt about 5 years ago was rejected with the justification
that I was "too inexperienced" to write crystallographic software.
Grant reviewers well say *anything*. I don't know where some of these
people come from, but it's as if funding agencies found a way to
triple-cross lawyers, politicians, and marketing executives.
I have always agreed to requests to incorporate parts of my code into
other programs (even direct competitors) and the versions of SHELX-76
modified by Dobi Rabinovich (to increase the number of atoms from 160
to 400!) and SHELXL-97 modified by Kay Diederichs (for multiple CPUs)
became part of the standard distribution. I was also worried that
rival
versions of SHELX, all with different input requirements and bugs,
would get into circulation and confuse users.
Open Source (the capital letter kind) is compatible with branding that
can come in the form of registered trade marks and other IP
protections. MySQL is one example:
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/trademark.html
There are dozens and dozens of other examples.
Also, to address some other confusion, Open Source also only applies
to the source code. Making useful executables is not one of the
requirements of open source nor is releasing the code that constructs
the executable, etc. The focus of Open Source is on ensuring openness
of the source code and it's availability for derivative works by the
author and others. Other types of availability are not requisite for a
project to be branded "Open Source".
James
