There are two major problems in basing revisions to Jmol on Chime-related
material:
1. The general body of law protecting intellectual property.
2. The license that everyone who uses Chime agreed to
Now, unless someone has a very large pot of money to mount a spirited
legal fight to carve out whatever exceptions can be carved out to
get around these problems, the best course forward is to steer clear
of basing anything that is intended to be open source on anything
in any way derived from Chime as opposed to being derived from RasMol,
except to the extent that MDL provides written permission.
Therefore, I suggest that we ask Eric Martz, who has the best
connections of any of us to MDL to ask them for explicit permission
to do designs of extensions to open source molecular graphics
programs based on
1. The currently availble supply of scripts using
the Chime command set, and
2. The Chime documentation
Naturally, in exchange we would agree to give MDL a nice credit for
their community spirit in the documentation of the programs using
that material.
My guess is that that will agree to our use of item 1, provided the
scripts in question were not authored by MDL staff and we have permission
of the person who is the author, but that they will not agree to item
2. However, we won't know until and unless the question is asked.
Eric, how about it? -- think how nice it would be if PE could slide
smoothly and easily over to Jmol as a base when Chime breathes its last
breath. Java may not be perfect, but at least it has a future and
it works on a wide range of platforms. And, as a bonus, if such
permission were granted I might be able to reduce the gap in
command sets between RasMol and Chime.
Regards,
Herbert
=====================================================
Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769
+1-631-244-3035
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
=====================================================
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, PHILLIP W BARAK wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Philippe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Sunday, October 26, 2003 11:52 pm
> Subject: Re: Chime's superset of RasMol script commands & reference manuals
>
> > Eric,
> >
> > I found a set of commands called "RasMol Scripts" at
> > http://www.mdl.com/support/developer/chime/developer_tools/chimerasmol.jsp.
> > Is-it the one you are talking about? Some of these commands would be
> > relatively simple to implement; I see for example the slab +|-
> > that was
> > mentionned earlier. I wonder if a copyright claim can be made on
> > this set of
> > keywords. I have some doubts, but I am not a lawyer.
>
> This question sounds a bit like the Lotus/Borland look-and-feel of the Quatto menu
> in Lotus-emulation mode violated U.S. copyright. For discussion, see "1990-1995: The
> Lotus look and feel suits" at
> http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html
>
> --Phil Barak
>
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>
>
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