I'm sorry I seemed cavalier about the open source issues. I was over
in happy-hacker-land and forgot that we live in the real world. I have
a huge respect for open source, and *want* to contribute; I just don't
know the details of what I'm allowed to do yet. Whether or not we use
Jmol, I will be a strong advocate of making our project's source
available. Please consider me a willing, albeit ignorant,
collaborator.
Thanks for clarifying the GPL. I didn't quite understand that if I use
it I have to make the modified source available under the LGPL.
The lawyers are all on vacation now, so I'm going to take a few days
to see if I can get it to work -- if it does, then I'll definitely
contact the IP lawyers and have them get in touch with you.
Some issues to consider when we bring the lawyers into the conversation:
* We're planning to use it for students in a Brown organic chemistry
class, and probably to demo to our sponsors (commercial &
governmental) and at technical conferences. Does that count as
distribution?
* I might try some rendering additions-- shadows, particularly. My
understanding is that I'd have to contribute this back -- which
probably means that I should do it in java then port it to J#, so it's
available in both Jmol and Jmol/J#.
Shall we move this discussion off the jmol-users list?
-sascha
Egon Willighagen wrote:
On Wednesday 29 December 2004 16:43, Miguel wrote:
I got the go-ahead from my customers to give this a shot -- I'll report
back on how it goes. I'll try to do it in such a way that the J# version
can be automatically generated from the Java version. I'll have to check
with our IP guys, but I think I'll be able to contribute the J# version
back to the Jmol project. (We haven't worked much with open source at
Brown, yet).
Sascha,
I am somewhat concerned by some of your comments. Just to clarify ...
You said:
I'll have to check with our IP guys, but I think I'll be
able to contribute the J# version back to the Jmol project.
You are doing a direct translation of the Jmol source code into J#. That
is clearly a derivative work.
Agreed.
If you use or modify the Jmol source code then you must make the source
code available unde the LGPL license.
Partly agree. See below.
The Jmol project may or may not choose to incorporate your source, but the
decision is ours, not yours.
If those terms are not acceptable then you may not use the Jmol source
code.
Make sure your *IP guys* understand and agree with that.
That's indeed very important.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
No doubt the legal staff at Brown takes IP very seriously ... I do too.
Please feel free to contact me if you or your attorneys have any questions.
I was just looking up these things, and mostly agree with Miguel's analysis.
Some comments. One the GNU/Linux platform it is assumed to be legal to write
proprietary software that used kernel functionality, given that the later is
accessed using a well defined interface. The idea here is that the thing
beneath the interface can be replaced so the program using the interface is
not really depending on the implementation, but on the interface instead.
That said, Jmol uses an interface, so I *think* (I'm not an attorney, so I
might be wrong) that not subclassing LGPL code (because that's derived work
for sure [1]) and not modifying LGPL code, allows you to keep stuff
proprietary. But as soon as you have to make modifications to LGPL classes
*or* subclass LGPL classes, *that* code must be LGPL too.
I hope that is a bit clear.
Another thing is that the above only applies *when* you actually distribute
things. As long as you keep derived work internal, i.e. do not distribute
anything (sell/give away/share/whatever), you are not obliged to distribute
the source code with LGPL. The reason why I say this: you're fine trying to
get it to work first, and decide then wether you want to start distribute it.
Egon
1. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OOPLang
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