Dear Gianluca, On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Gianluca Sforna <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Greg Landrum <[email protected]> wrote: >> If there are still outstanding bugs >> or problems that you are aware of, or if you have simple feature >> requests, please let me know ASAP so we can get them in this release. > > Hi Greg, nothing really blocking your release, but I think it would be > nice to have a review of the license texts in the source files so it > would be easier to get past legal reviews in distributions. > > In fact, all files have headers like: > > // Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Greg Landrum and Rational Discovery LLC > // > // @@ All Rights Reserved @@ > // > > or similar wordings. The issues is that, since there is no reference > to any license, if I pick one module from RDKit and put it in another > program, there is no evidence of its licensing status, and you can't > assume anymore it's free to use.
Good point about what would happen if someone were to pull a file and include it somewhere else. Back when we did the first open-source release I thought a bit about this issue (which is why the All Rights Reserved part is inside "@@" markings) but I never followed up. > I think you should instead put some reference of the actual license in > each file, similarly as many other projects. > > For instance, I found the text used by the webM project at > http://review.webmproject.org/gitweb?p=libvpx.git;a=summary > > to be: > > /* > * Copyright (c) 2010 The WebM project authors. All Rights Reserved. > * > * Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license > * that can be found in the LICENSE file in the root of the source > * tree. An additional intellectual property rights grant can be found > * in the file PATENTS. All contributing project authors may > * be found in the AUTHORS file in the root of the source tree. > */ > > it should be fine for RDKit as well, of course minus the PATENTS and > AUTHOR parts. > > If you agree I can help scripting the change so you don't go mad > chasing and changing all the instances. How about something like: // Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Greg Landrum and Rational Discovery LLC (or whatever current files have) and then, instead of: // @@ All Rights Reserved @@ something like: // All Rights Reserved // This file is part of the RDKit; The contents are covered by the terms of the BSD license // which is included in the file license.txt, found at the root of the RDKit source tree. Leaving the "all rights reserved" in the file is following a recommendation from here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php Any suggestions/refinements to the above reformulation? One aside: the files that have been contributed by Novartis contain the full BSD license text at the top. These, obviously, don't need to be changed. -greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Rdkit-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rdkit-discuss
