[DAS] Question about das development.
Bill Gooding
bgood97@yahoo.com
Wed, 21 Aug 2002 10:10:06 -0700 (PDT)
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Hi Everybody,
Treat this as a global response to everyone's posts, I don't want to respond individually.
On the licencing stuff: I think I agree with Matthew's reasoning on this. That's why I am just going to use LGPL. But really the most important thing to me is that I can't be sued for millions of dollars if my program has some horrible bug that deletes all the files a user has. I hope you don't misinterpret the prior statement, there are no delete functions in any of my code so this should never happen. I don't want to scare off people who might test the stuff. And anyway, even commercial software has disclaimers on all bugs. That is, if the Microsoft operating system deletes all your files, you can't sue Microsoft. And that's software you paid for.
On the status of my software: I have gotton a verbal commitment that when I am ready, a place will be made for me in the biodas cvs vault. Thanks, Lincoln. So at this point the ball is in my court. Before I can distribute what I have via CVS, I need to do some boilerplate work. There are 3 files I will generate - a README, LICENCE, and INSTALL. I want to make it as easy as possible for you to run a version of my code. At that point, people will better understand and can evaluate what I have and what it does. Please remember the code I will checkin will not be as mature as other code in bio* areas. I really intend it as a way to start a discussion about the architechture that I propose. I also intend to have at least one other person install my software using the INSTALL file directions *before* I checkin to CVS. I think I have found someone who could donate about 3-5 hours. This should at least guarantee that my directions are not too cryptic or incorrect (that is, I may have made changes to my environment to make the program run, and forgot what those changes were - I am sure this happens all the time when developing/exhanging software). I just want to guarantee that my directions/documentation have been looked over by at least one other person to assure a limited degree of readability and user focus. And then after all that if nobody likes my software, most computers have a delete function :-). I anticipate that I will have something ready for general distribution on CVS in 2-4 weeks.
On technical questions at this point: I am going to focus on what I said in the previous paragraph. Hopefully my README file should outline my intent fairly well. Therefore I will for the most part defer answering technical questions until the work outlined in the previous paragraph is done.
I appreciate everyone's help and comments,
Bill Gooding
Matthew Pocock wrote:Hi Bill,
We use LGPL for BioJava for the reasons you state. We are more than
happy for other people to use biojava in both nonprofit and commercial
applications. We are not keen to have someone extend it and then claim
ownership of the original code base. LGPL covers us for this (I hope).
GPL would not be appropreate for us as it would force everyone who
distributed code that links to BioJava to also be GPL-compliant, killing
of the possibility of MS using BioJava as their standard bioinformatics
.NET library ;-) I don't want to get into a licensing war - in fact, I'd
be happy for biojava to be under a BSD-like, or perl artistic-like
license. The spirit and reason for LGPL just happens to coincide with
what we want out of a license for library code.
Matthew
Bill Gooding wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks, Lincoln. That's exactly what I needed to know. And even if my
> jar files become a problem in the das repository, you can always destroy
> the history on them.
>
> As to these open source licences, to tell you the truth, I don't really
> have a detailed understanding of any of them. I am not sure any lawyer
> has a detailed understanding either :-). I am intending to allow free
> access to the code, so all I really want to is protect myself from
> trouble. What I do understand about LGPL, is that anyone can take the
> source code and use it,extend it,sell it, even relicense it however they
> like (including me). If they do any of these things, they have to
> ackowledge that they got the code from my package (that is LGPL) and
> give a link to where others can get the code. If this is true (and I
> think it is, please correct me if not), then this should be fine. The
> only problem might be if they decide to randomly patent some extension
> (which I don't think they could do, given that it would be an extension).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bill
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<P>Hi Everybody,
<P>Treat this as a global response to everyone's posts, I don't want to respond individually.
<P>On the licencing stuff: I think I agree with Matthew's reasoning on this. That's why I am just going to use LGPL. But really the most important thing to me is that I can't be sued for millions of dollars if my program has some horrible bug that deletes all the files a user has. I hope you don't misinterpret the prior statement, there are no delete functions in any of my code so this should never happen. I don't want to scare off people who might test the stuff. And anyway, even commercial software has disclaimers on all bugs. That is, if the Microsoft operating system deletes all your files, you can't sue Microsoft. And that's software you paid for.
<P>On the status of my software: I have gotton a verbal commitment that when I am ready, a place will be made for me in the biodas cvs vault. Thanks, Lincoln. So at this point the ball is in my court. Before I can distribute what I have via CVS, I need to do some boilerplate work. There are 3 files I will generate - a README, LICENCE, and INSTALL. I want to make it as easy as possible for you to run a version of my code. At that point, people will better understand and can evaluate what I have and what it does. Please remember the code I will checkin will not be as mature as other code in bio* areas. I really intend it as a way to start a discussion about the architechture that I propose. I also intend to have at least one other person install my software using the INSTALL file directions *before* I checkin to CVS. I think I have found someone who could donate about 3-5 hours. This should at least guarantee that my directions are not too cryptic or incorrect (that is, I may have made changes to my environment to make the program run, and forgot what those changes were - I am sure this happens all the time when developing/exhanging software). I just want to guarantee that my directions/documentation have been looked over by at least one other person to assure a limited degree of readability and user focus. And then after all that if nobody likes my software, most computers have a delete function :-). I anticipate that I will have something ready for general distribution on CVS in 2-4 weeks.
<P>On technical questions at this point: I am going to focus on what I said in the previous paragraph. Hopefully my README file should outline my intent fairly well. Therefore I will for the most part defer answering technical questions until the work outlined in the previous paragraph is done.
<P>I appreciate everyone's help and comments,
<P>
<P>Bill Gooding
<P>
<P> <B><I>Matthew Pocock <MATTHEW_POCOCK@YAHOO.CO.UK></I></B>wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">Hi Bill,<BR><BR>We use LGPL for BioJava for the reasons you state. We are more than <BR>happy for other people to use biojava in both nonprofit and commercial <BR>applications. We are not keen to have someone extend it and then claim <BR>ownership of the original code base. LGPL covers us for this (I hope). <BR>GPL would not be appropreate for us as it would force everyone who <BR>distributed code that links to BioJava to also be GPL-compliant, killing <BR>of the possibility of MS using BioJava as their standard bioinformatics <BR>.NET library ;-) I don't want to get into a licensing war - in fact, I'd <BR>be happy for biojava to be under a BSD-like, or perl artistic-like <BR>license. The spirit and reason for LGPL just happens to coincide with <BR>what we want out of a license for library code.<BR><BR>Matthew<BR><BR>Bill Gooding wrote:<BR>> Hi,<BR>> <BR>> Thanks, Lincoln. That's exactly what I needed to know. And even if my <BR>> jar files become a problem in the das repository, you can always destroy <BR>> the history on them.<BR>> <BR>> As to these open source licences, to tell you the truth, I don't really <BR>> have a detailed understanding of any of them. I am not sure any lawyer <BR>> has a detailed understanding either :-). I am intending to allow free <BR>> access to the code, so all I really want to is protect myself from <BR>> trouble. What I do understand about LGPL, is that anyone can take the <BR>> source code and use it,extend it,sell it, even relicense it however they <BR>> like (including me). If they do any of these things, they have to <BR>> ackowledge that they got the code from my package (that is LGPL) and <BR>> give a link to where others can get the code. If this is true (and I <BR>> think it is, please correct me if not), then this should be fine. The <BR>> only problem might be if they decide to randomly patent some extension <BR>> (which I don't think they could do, given that it would be an extension).<BR>> <BR>> Thanks,<BR>> <BR>> Bill<BR><BR>__________________________________________________<BR>Do You Yahoo!?<BR>Everything you'll ever need on one web page<BR>from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts<BR>http://uk.my.yahoo.com<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>DAS mailing list<BR>DAS@biodas.org<BR>http://biodas.org/mailman/listinfo/das</BLOCKQUOTE><p><br><hr size=1><b>Do You Yahoo!?</b><br>
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