[Debichem-devel] DFTBaby/FISH license

[Michael Banck]

Dear Alexande, dear Jens,

Debichem is a sub-project of the Debian/Ubuntu Linux distributions
aiming at packaging useful chemistry-related Free and Open Source
Software.

I came across DFTBaby via your recent arXiv paper[1], and then noticed
FISH referenced at
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/humeniuka/DFTBaby/RELEASES/ as well.

I noticed that FISH does not have a license at all, and DFTBaby has

|This program is free software in the sense that you can modify or
|redistribute it as long as you observe the ethics code usually
|practiced in research.  In particular, do not blame me for any trouble
|caused by using this software.

I understand your intentions, but I would strongly suggest to license it
under an approved Open Source license if you indeed intent to have
DFTBaby be Open Source. For starters, strictly read, you allow
modifcations and redistributions, but you neither allow actual usage nor
the redistribution of modified versions (there's an "or" not an
"and/or").

Warranty exclusion is a common part of most open source licenses, so
that should be covered as well.  If you mean by "ethics code usually
practiced in research" something about citing your paper, then I suggest
to spell that out seperately, e.g. via a distinct CITATION file, and
clear language in README.

Whether you should pick a permissive or a copyleft license depends on
how you want your code used by others as part of a possibly bigger
project - I'd be happy to suggest specific licenses if you let me know
what your intentions are.


Best regards,

Michael

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04049