> The best way to avoid "derivative work" concern is to code in a "clean room" > fashion, without reference to someone else's code. In principle, this could > be done working from the original paper(s) that describe an algorithm.
I assume this is what authors of other packages have done in the past. If there's enough interest, and no one is working on this already, I'd be willing to take a stab at it. > Not that I'm volunteering ;-) Just that I would hate to see someone who was > willing and interested in implementing secondary structure code for PyMol to > be frightened off the job if, indeed, it could be done in a way that respects > others' rights. The other thing I'd find useful is some molecular mechanics tools, particularly energy minimization. Blending PyMOL with MMTK seems like a good way to do this, since MMTK's license looks fairly liberal. Personally, I'd have to spend two weeks looking at the code for both packages before I could even start thinking about how this would need to be done. I'm certainly not capable of implementing anything like that from scratch- I slept through math class in college. -Nat Echols
