Dear Pete, just my personal view on this (so don't take this as a legal expertise regarding our SHARP licence). I don't have any problems with people comparing software programs - I do that all the time. I doubt this can be seen as reverse engineering.
The tricky part comes when comparisons are being published: ideally it would be nice if every developer of a particular piece of software is given the chance to comment - maybe he/she could even give a few simple advices how to run the program. After all, different programs might have different set of defaults (conservative versus adventurous) for particular problems. It's similar to a problem we discover e.g. in a PDB entry: contacting the authors of that PDB entry first to give them a chance to comment (and correct) I think is the apropriate initial step. Or actually - lets rephrase that: it's not like an error in a PDB entry! Improvements in software benefit a lot more crystallographers whereas a fixed PDB entry usually concerns a much smaller group of us. Anyway, I think we're doing actually fairly well compared to other scientific fields: crystallographic method developers are a very friendly bunch I must say, even if we're in a kind of 'competition'. Cheers Clemens On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 09:53:19AM -0500, Pete Meyer wrote: > Apologies for going slightly further off-topic... > > Last time I had a free half-day to look into sharp, I noticed that the > academic license prohibits reverse-engineering. This seemed to put any > comparative testing into a slightly grey area. For example, if I find > that sharp does the best job refining sites, but bp3 outputs better > phases for a dataset due to different representation of phase > probabilities*, I've implicitly constructed a primitive model of how > sharp is working. This seems close enough to a first step of > reverse-engineering that I was concerned. > > Could someone confirm that I'm worrying about things I don't need to here? > > Pete > > * Purely hypothetical example. -- *************************************************************** * Clemens Vonrhein, Ph.D. vonrhein AT GlobalPhasing DOT com * * Global Phasing Ltd. * Sheraton House, Castle Park * Cambridge CB3 0AX, UK *-------------------------------------------------------------- * BUSTER Development Group (http://www.globalphasing.com) ***************************************************************
