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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] cc-licenses Digest, Vol 32, Issue 42

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] cc-licenses Digest, Vol 32, Issue 42
  • Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:40:56 -0600

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:27:51 -0800 (PST)
phyllostachys nuda <phnuda AT yahoo.com> wrote:
> As for MONGO, I tried to look it up. The last version I
> could find was from 1998 and had no license at all that
> I could find, not that I went through all the .tex files
> looking for one. In the early 1990s apparently it
> required you to pay for it. I tried to look up Chaco. I
> can't find anything about its reason for being created.
> Apparently the license historians have been a little
> lax.

It is hard to look up, precisely because of the poor job of
licensing.

In fact, MONGO is covered by about 7 or 8 different licenses
covering different parts of the code. They are compatible
because they are *not* copyleft licenses. OTOH, one of them
contains the "no nukes" language, which essentially "taints"
the whole.

There are, of course, four reasons why you won't find a
version of Mongo post 1998:

1) No one wants to mix their code up with a questionably
licensed piece of work -- it's effort wasted.

2) There is a commercial proprietary branch (still bearing
the same limitation) called "SuperMongo" or "SM" or even
"S&M". "Those programmers are a laugh a minute, aren't
they?" This probably has something to do with the
fact that the full name of Mongo was "Lick Mongo", since it
was developed at the Lick Observatory.

3) Actually, it works well enough to do the job (prepare
scientific plots for publication), so what's to improve?

4) Did I mention that Mongo is written in Fortran? Chaco is
written in Python.

It is indeed quite difficult to search for the original
Mongo code, and I found it by searching internal channels
which may not be available to you. The original authors
sort of "killed" it to create market for SM, apparently, but
it is still (or was in 2002) passed hand-to-hand.

As for Chaco, it's on the SciPy pages, and it is indeed
under a free license, sponsored through STScI. One hardly
needs to have this reality spelled out.

But in any case, I don't need a "license historian". I was
*there*: Any working astronomer in the 1990s would know
about Mongo and any working today knows about Chaco. No,
I can't point to a particular webpage from STScI that
explains this, but I have read a lot of output from them
during 2001-2002 when I was still working in the field and
Chaco was being developed. I read the STScI "whitepapers" on
Chaco's development and so on.

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com





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