At 10:25 AM -0400 10/14/12, Robert Hanson wrote: >Dan, > >Good to hear from you. Jmol's license is pretty commercial-friendly --- LGPL. >That pretty much just means that if a commercial operation changes the code, >they have to make those changes available. Maybe consult with Google to find >out if that is acceptable.
Hi, I'm coordinating and doing a bunch of the technical development on the Lab repository where the Next Generation Molecular Workbench Interactives are being developed. https://github.com/concord-consortium/lab The requirements that our work under this grant be available to anybody to use how they want doesn't involve Google directly but are written into our grant agreement from the Google Foundation. To meet this requirement we've chosen to license code under the three main commercial-friendly open source licenses: MIT, BSD, Apache 2-0, and any content is licensed under the CC-BY-3.0. Currently we have two main modeling engines partially implemented: 1) HTML5 Next Generation Molecular Workbench http://lab.concord.org/examples/interactives/interactives.html 2) HTML5 JavaScript and WebGL Energy2D http://lab.concord.org/energy2d.html We hope to integrate more modeling engines in future projects. In terms of external code I allow to be directly integrated into the repository it needs to have a compatible license. I want to make it as easy as possible for an external user to be able to use our code (and libraries and frameworks we include). Basically all we are requiring is attribution. Strategically we also think this is a good choice for us because our most important goal is to impact how people learn and it'sour judgement that the possibility of improvements to our code being done in closed-source forks is a much smaller riskand cost compared to benefits that come from allowing the work to be used as easily as possible by as many different kinds of groups as possible. So I'd be very happy to have our work integrated into curriculum that was distributed by Wikipedia-like organizations whichmadeall the curricular content and code freely available. I'd also like to see commercial educational publishers use and distribute our work in their curricular projects. I don't know which path is likely to be more successful, but I worry that LGPL licensing will be a barrier for commercial publishers. It's certainly quite practical from an IP point of view for us to use separate funding to integrate the HTML5 Next Generation MW work with the HTML5 Jmol. The LGPL licensing of HTML5 Jmol is no barrier there. Of course that means having a separate project to fund this effort. However when I think about the possible impact I want to have on learning I am concerned about the possible reluctance of acommercial publisher to use the combined product when part of it is licensed under the LGPL. At the Concord Consortium we've been releasing all our source code under the LGPL for many years. When we chose to use thislicense one of the theoretical benefits is that our work could both be integrated into closed-source projects AND the license itself would prevent closed-source commercial forks extending our work. That restriction might then encourage a group interested in a new feature to instead develop it and contribute it back to the community. The reality (for the work we have done) is that we have had practically no contributions from external groups. In addition the LGPL subtle and hard to explain to other groups. So we are considering revising how we license code created by CC in general. -- -- Stephen Bannasch Director of Technology, Concord Consortium http://www.concord.org mailto:sbanna...@concord.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list Jmol-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
