RE: permission to redistribute cw260 (in gerris)
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.Parsons@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.Parsons@anu.edu.au, dparsons@debian.org
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