Re: [Rdkit-discuss] Moving towards the next release

[Gianluca S. <gi...@gm...>]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Greg Landrum <gre...@gm...> wrote:
> If there are still outstanding bugs
> or problems that you are aware of, or if you have simple feature
> requests, please let me know ASAP so we can get them in this release.

Hi Greg, nothing really blocking your release, but I think it would be
nice to have a review of the license texts in the source files so it
would be easier to get past legal reviews in distributions.

In fact, all files have headers like:

//  Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Greg Landrum and Rational Discovery LLC
//
//   @@ All Rights Reserved  @@
//

or similar wordings. The issues is that, since there is no reference
to any license, if I pick one module from RDKit and put it in another
program, there is no evidence of its licensing status, and you can't
assume anymore it's free to use.

I think you should instead put some reference of the actual license in
each file, similarly as many other projects.

For instance, I found the text used by the webM project at
http://review.webmproject.org/gitweb?p=libvpx.git;a=summary

to be:

/*
 *  Copyright (c) 2010 The WebM project authors. All Rights Reserved.
 *
 *  Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license
 *  that can be found in the LICENSE file in the root of the source
 *  tree. An additional intellectual property rights grant can be found
 *  in the file PATENTS.  All contributing project authors may
 *  be found in the AUTHORS file in the root of the source tree.
 */

it should be fine for RDKit as well, of course minus the PATENTS and
AUTHOR parts.

If you agree I can help scripting the change so you don't go mad
chasing and changing all the instances.

-- 
Gianluca Sforna

http://morefedora.blogspot.com
http://identi.ca/giallu - http://twitter.com/giallu