Ahh, yes. And this is the result of nearly 3 years of trying to
square our desire to release the libraries under as open a license as
possible, while the lawyers try and cover the organisation's backside
in case someone wants to sue. I believe an attempt was made to
ensure that third parties could redistribute the libraries under
LGPL, but that founders a bit on the rocks of indemnity.
Why was 6.0 not released under LGPL, as 5.0.2 was, well, our lawyers
did not fancy trying to defend a damages case under English law when
the LGPL was used. So until there is legal precedent STFC lawyers
are going to remain wary of the GPL and LGPL.
Charles
ps- these are my views, not CCP4's or STFC's.
On 3 Jul 2007, at 20:25, Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve wrote:
> > > The approach adopted by Coot, which is GPL'd, is to use the CCP4
> > > 5.0.2 libraries, which are LGPL, along with some patches
currently
> > > maintained by Ralph Grosse-Kunstleve to address the more serious
> > > deficiencies of the older libraries.
> > >
> >
> > Are the libraries with the patches available publicly?
>
> They would have to be - that's the point of the GPL :-)
The subset (!) of the CCP4 5.0.2 libraries that we need for the cctbx
is included in in the cctbx bundles here:
http://cci.lbl.gov/cctbx_build/
A standalone tar file is also available, e.g. a specific version:
http://cci.lbl.gov/cctbx_build/results/2007_05_29_2026/
ccp4io_502_cci.tar.gz
Or the current version:
http://cci.lbl.gov/cctbx_build/results/current/ccp4io_502_cci.tar.gz
BTW: We cannot redistribute the CCP4 6 libraries because of an
indemnification clause. Being at a government lab, it is virtually
impossible to get our lawyers to accept this clause.
CCP4 offered a click-through license to "pass on" the indemnification,
but that would have been more work technically than maintaining
the older LGPL'ed libraries, and it would make the cctbx a lot less
attractive for others, since everybody would have to deal with the
indemnification clause when redistributing the cctbx as part of
another package.
Ralf
Get your own web address.
Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business.
