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- What are the licensing models adopted by our various projects?
- Loffler - Base framework is free software, user-specific modules are free to choose, but sometimes even don't carry license unless used by a larger group of people.
- CyberGIS has a mix of open source (MIT, Python license) and free but not open source. But every piece of code developed within the project by funded developers is open source. License choice is under investigation
- DOE. No restrictions on Licensing. In the past had to check the nationality of the person. The licensing they do use restricts the reuse and redistribution. If a commercial entity wants to use the code, then University has a special license with company.
- When you open source your code and have proprietary code in it, then you could have legal problems. Have the anone contributing code sign a non exclusive content provider agreement.
- U Washington - any code that is written on fed funds gives all fed employees free license. Have several other version of license depending on the type of developer and user.
- Condor - switched to the apache license, downstream distributions didn't want to deal with condor public license
- contributors need to sign a condor contributor agreement, they have full right to do anything they want to do with the code
- an alternative, they license it to the public domain, or under the BSD
- big archeological dig to get license straight
- Amber - custom license originally, through UCSF
- acadmic license - 400
- commercial, 20,000k dollars
- charging for the license doesn't impact the usage of the code, from what Ross can tell
- what have done, has open sourced some of the packages, amber tools - free to download, this is done - to promote use of the amber force fields in other people's codes, these are the tools you need to set up force fields - the forcefields are
- most of the code, don't know the history of, to find it out - a big deal
- big collection of licenses to amber tools
- amber tools -and amber engine
- part of amber development team - all postdocs/students under Pi that signed, are under the license, giving the Amber folks permission to use their code
- fee waiver for anyone who doesn't have funds to purchase the software - this is a free license -
- pays for things like development meetings (yearly) - 50-100 students + pis to meet together, no other way to fund
- gives consistency to the code -
- there are plenty of patches on the web, for people who didn't want to contribute to the main package, but on balance, most people want to get their code into the tree - expose their code automatically to a large # of users, without having to advertise
- GAMESS - research group license , able to distribute source to anyone in your institutoni institution or company
- but we retain ownership -of source, can't distribute the source or binaries outside of the institution or company
- this prevents code from going into commercial codes -
- there is commercial electronic structure code- where their license says you can't compare the performance of say gaussian veruss Gamess!
- eclipse public license -
- and commiter
- outside contributors:
- Amber has a lot of outside
- what fraction of the total code?
- what fraction of the code comes from outside contributors -
- Amber doesn't have distrinct list of developers
- but likely 5-10% -
- people that contribute more than single method, they are authors of
- Anshu - more than 50% of the code would be external, this is a recruiting tool -
- some start out clueless
- Do any of the projects have relationships with larger open source organizations, and thereby benefit from their distribution mechanisms (and potentially from their intellectual property offices, etc)?
- Amber has been around for 30 years, having it licensed in this way has not killed it - have set version history, this is critical for scientific code, know exactly what version you used -
- does the revenue distributed by commercial sufficient to sustain? doesn't come close to sustaining development, but it is gold plated money - pays for servers we have, things like that - doesn't pay anyone's salary -
- sustainability: have critical mass, it self-sustains - it was led by peter kohlman, when he died, next person was able to keep it going, when he retires, there is enough crticial mass below
- people claim open source
- George Karypis - speaking of licensing, how is university office that you deal with - do they agree with open source, or complain
- Ross: when wrote SI2 proposal, had requirement that software developed under this proposal - is open source, but scope is not well defined -
- this code - developed by the proposal, is open source, but useless without the rest of the code
- ucsd - said this was not possible, due to the agreement signed when joined the university
- funds receive from NSF are way short on what you put into the development -
- poorly defined areas of scope -
- how are you going to deal with this?
- release open source cuda md library - how well this will work will remain to be seen -
- download amber tools, and library, demonstrate demo interface with this -
- Anshu - no problems -
- Eric Van Wyk - didn't talk to anyone in Minnesota -
- industry wants some license -
- Ross objects to the RFP requiring open source -
- nsf, doe
- but don't say that you can't patent a drug -
- not sure why the software - needs to be given away -
- George Karypis - over years developed many sw packages, numerical solver - initial release in mid-90s - in 97, 98 - sun microsystems came, would like to incorporate this, would like a license, went to university office of technology licensing, they got up in arms, eventually agreed to give sun a license for free, to give them the right to do this
- his experience, tools don't follow official license -
- his experience, with U Minn - last 5-6 years, very aggressive to license sw - this correlates with cuts to funding -
- dedicated person to software licensing, and now have firm marketing university sw - gets tricky if want to release someone for free -
- Todd - for money, doesn't make a lot of money - university does sell support, from UW, which means email questions go to the front of the queue -
- redistributing code, claim from us - code is apache, but condor term is registered trademark -
- Amber - well known semiempricial code, mopac, very good code, but not originally written for dynamics, got used to do dynamics, when started post-doc, wanted to repeat some simulations from phd, and
- found serious problem with mopac
- and found copies of this semi-emipircal mopac code in gaussian,
- this bug was in every single implementation of semi-empirical qmmd -
- perfectly reproducible, incorrect results -
- this code was "public domain", not open source -
- found serious problem with mopac
- Todd - not about license, but code reuse is bad sometimes -
- need 2 independent implementations to verify -
- flash got into clusters competition, at SC11 - downloaded code, and found out that it was a third party, bug was some physics not in the distribution, it did not adhere to our coding standards, couldn't run on clusters, the fact that we do have a license, and the distribution was illegal, could exploit to change the part of the code causing the problems - this was a incorrect use of the code - woudl have caused us lots of problems
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