Re: towards feff8.2 release

[Matt Newville <newville@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the reply and information about the Toolkit ideas.
I am a bit sorry I missed the meeting in Seattle, but the truth
is that Feff development is really more of a hobby for me.
I'd like to help, but there's only so much time I can give.

I would be very pleased if Stocks' notions of Toolkit and
software interfaces and development were applied to Feff.

I would be even more pleased if an Open Source licenes were
used, as it would mean that I could contribute to the Feff
Project and get something in return.

> Yes feff is under UW OTT license. The license question also was

Unless something has changed recently, Feff in actually under a
license from UW Physics not under a UW-OTT license.  I think
many people are confused by this -- I certainly was for a long
time.  I believe that if UW-OTT were handling licensing, things
would be very different than they are now.

The UW policy is that intellectual property belongs to authors,
unless otherwise arranged.  Not departments.  Authors.  With
authors narrowly defined as 'those who wrote the actual code'.
You, Alex, Steve Z, Bruce R, Jose MdL, Bob A, and John R.  Not
UW Physics, not 'The Feff Project', not John Rehr, PI, and not
John Rehr, Thesis Advisor.  The upshot of this is that you,
Alex, can choose the license to use for YOUR code. Very good
things would happen (and soon) if the license were changed to
Open Source.  You have that power.

I agree with Stocks' group: There are real issues between BSD
and GPL.  These should be discussed.  I lean towards BSD
myself, and have used a BSD license for my work, but could be
persuaded to switch to GPL if it was felt more appropriate for
a more complete suite of components and programs.  But the
current Feff license has no place in the conversation.

--Matt

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