On Oct 7 we had a rather open ended discussion of copyright issues, including our use of the GNU Copyleft.
There was one point made that I felt was sufficiently important that I wanted to mention it again online. People sometimes wonder why I am such a fan of the CopyLeft. There are various reasons, and one that I am just coming to appreciate relates to what happens to a student's code after they leave UMD. After a student leaves a place, there are sometimes awkward situations that result from both student and professor (that would be me :) wondering things like "well, that was certainly interesting work and I'd liek to continue it". But the awkwardness comes into the picture when it's not clear who "owns" the code we developed, and under what terms it can be used somewhere else. Well, the CopyLeft more or less resolves that situation for us. It means that both student and professor have exactly the same rights as anyone else who uses our code! We have the right to re-distribute and modify, as long as we preserve the original copyright notices and provide source code. So we can do this together, or we can do it on our own. In other words, it would be perfectly acceptable for someone to "fork" their UMD project in a new way, and create a new package based on the old one. Or you could continue to modify the package and have it included in the UMD distribution. Or you could completely forget about it and be confident that your name and copyright will be preserved and respected by all of us here at UMD who might still be working with it. In any case, this is not to say that we couldn't work out some of these details without the CopyLeft - we probably good. But, the CopyLeft guarantees that neither one of us can simply take the work you have done here and run off with it, or claim to own or control it exclusively. I think that's a very nice feature of the CopyLeft, and I hope you all understand and feel the same (ie that you continue to have many many rights to the code you developed here, and can use it and modify it just like anybody else!) Let me know if you have any questions about all this. These are important issues, and I'm always anxious to make sure everyone understands the rights they have regarding the work they did here at UMD! Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
