[vtk-developers] Attributing VTK in a commercial app

[Berk Geveci]

;-)

Sorry I didn't get it. I feel like an app having documentation is the
exception rather than the rule :-)

-berk

On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 8:08 AM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Berk,
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> Note that I never meant to say that an app without documentation could
> skip the copyright notice.  My comment
> "assuming that the commercial app has documentation" was tongue-in-cheek ;)
>
>  - David
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 8:31 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
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtk-developers/attachments/20150119/71894280/attachment.html>