[vtk-developers] Attributing VTK in a commercial app

Berk Geveci berk.geveci at kitware.com
Mon Jan 19 09:49:08 EST 2015


Yup.

On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 8:08 AM, David Cole <DLRdave at aol.com> wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Powered by www.kitware.com
> >>
> >> Visit other Kitware open-source projects at
> >> http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html
> >>
> >> Search the list archives at:
> http://markmail.org/search/?q=vtk-developers
> >>
> >> Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe:
> >> http://public.kitware.com/mailman/listinfo/vtk-developers
> >>
> >>
> >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtk-developers/attachments/20150119/4b5cb8fe/attachment.html>


More information about the vtk-developers mailing list