Dear Drew I really don't have strong feelings about it: whatever makes life easier. I'm certainly happy for this software to be freely available in the Public Domain, as long as I am not held responsible for the consequences of any errors!
Regards John Chaplin School of Civil Engineering & the Environment University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 2843; Fax: +44 (0)23 8067 7519 -----Original Message----- From: Drew Parsons [mailto:drew.pars...@anu.edu.au] Sent: 01 June 2009 09:20 To: Chaplin J.R. Cc: debian-science Subject: permission to redistribute cw260 (in gerris) Dear Prof. Chaplin, I have been using gerris as part of my research at the Dept. of Applied Mathematics, Australian National University. Gerris is a Flow Solver written by Stéphane Popinet at the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research; it's website starts at http://gfs.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. It contains an optional module called "stokes", which makes use of your cw260 wave solution. Now I am also a member of the Debian GNU/Linux project (www.debian.org) and help maintain the gerris package provided as part of Debian. One of the things Debian takes pride in is being sticklers for correctly using software licences and supporting "Free Software". We've written a description of what we mean by "free software" at http://www.debian.org/intro/free and list our "Debian Free Software Guidelines" at http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines Your cw260 routine (with kmts) is found in a fortran file, CW263.f, which can be downloaded from http://www.civil.soton.ac.uk/hydraulics/download/downloadtable.htm . Your email address is listed in that file, identifying you as the author, but it does not otherwise explicitly state the terms under which you are happy for other people to use and distribute the code. Did you intend it to be freely available in the Public Domain, or under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), same as the rest of gerris? Unfortunately I have to ask a silly question like this since otherwise the pedants at Debian might insist we remove this Stokes module with the cw260 code on the grounds that we're "not legally licenced to distribute". I think it would be better to keep your code in since it could be useful to others, so I thought I'd write to clarify the matter. I've cc:d the Debian Science mailing list in order to have this question on the record for others to read later. I hope you can help. Thank you kindly, Dr. Drew Parsons Dept. of Applied Mathematics Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering Australian National University Email: drew.pars...@anu.edu.au, dpars...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-science-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org