[vtk-developers] Attributing VTK in a commercial app

[David Cole]

Thanks to all of you for the input on this thread. Sorry if it seemed
like it was "a big deal..."

We are planning to provide a file named Notice.html with our
documentation that, in its content, reproduces the Copyright.txt file
from the VTK source tree we use in our build. A button in our About
box will launch the locally installed Notice.html file in a web
browser.

>From what I'm understanding, this will be sufficient.


Thanks again,
David C.


On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
> 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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>