[vtk-developers] Attributing VTK in a commercial app

[Berk Geveci]

Hi David (Gobbi),

I agree that this discussion is making a much bigger deal about this than
it has to be. This is no big deal but you are not 100% right either :-) The
license clearly says this:

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

So whether or not the product has originally any documentation, it "must
reproduce the copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
disclaimer". This can be in documentation or in an about box or in whatever
the users of the product can see. You can not legally skip this simply
because you don't have documentation or another convenient way to present
it to users. Of course, this can be in some obscure part of the
distribution but it must be part of the distribution where users can see it.

By the way, reproduction does not mean you can simply provide a link to a
Web page. The license clearly states what needs to be reproduced

Best,
-berk


On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 1:48 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.  This really isn't
> even a VTK-specific issue, since I'm sure that your application uses
> tons of other bsd-licensed code in addition to VTK.
>
> The license says nothing about what you put into the "About" box.  If
> you want, you could add a couple lines to say "This software makes
> use of the following third-party open-source libraries:" and list the
> packages that you use the most heavily.  Again, this is totally optional,
> it's just a courtesy.
>
> Assuming that your commercial app has documentation, you should
> list the VTK license in an appendix.  Just say the following:
> "This software makes use of VTK, copyright (c) Ken Martin, Will
> Schroeder, and Bill Lorensen.  The VTK license is shown below".
> In fact, I'm sure that it instead of saying "shown below", it would be
> okay to simply link to the above-referenced web page (that's what
> the source files themselves do).
>
> Yes, Kitware should be updating the date in the copyright file.
>
>  - David
>
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