Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of Swarm

[Loic Dachary]

        Hi,

        In the current distribution, the license notice at the beginning
of each file does not provide the best protection to the software. Imagine,
for instance, that someone takes a few files from the swarm distribution and
include them into another software ... for which the COPYING file contains
completly different conditions (not GNU GPL). In theory, when someone
copy files she should be careful about this. In practice people rarely
pay attention and the licensing conditions of these files are simply 
lost. That's only one of the reaons why the GNU GPL itself recommends
a specific license notice that avoids these pitfalls.

        In addition, the license notice in the files recommend to check
the LICENSE file but there is not LICENSE file in the distribution (COPYING
was meant, I guess). But this won't be a problem once you've inserted a
license notice as instructed below ;-)

        Could you please submit your project again when you're done with
this ?

        Thanks in advance,


---

            How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

  If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest
possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it
free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

  To do so, attach the following notices to the program.  It is safest
to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

    <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
    Copyright (C) 19yy  <name of author>

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA


Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this
when it starts in an interactive mode:

    Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
    Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
    This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
    under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate
parts of the General Public License.  Of course, the commands you use may
be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be
mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if
necessary.  Here is a sample; alter the names:

  Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
  `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.

  <signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989
  Ty Coon, President of Vice

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs.  If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General
Public License instead of this License.

address@hidden writes:
 > 
 > A package was submitted to savannah.gnu.org.
 > This mail was sent to address@hidden, address@hidden
 > 
 > 
 > Alex Lancaster <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
 > License: gpl
 > Other License: 
 > Package: Swarm
 > System name: swarm
 > This package does NOT want to apply for inclusion in the GNU project
 > 
 > Swarm is a software package (a kernel and library) for multi-agent 
 > simulation of complex systems, developed by the Swarm Development Group 
 > (SDG, see below for a description).  Swarm is a useful tool for researchers 
 > in a variety of disciplines and has been in active development and use in 
 > the scientific community since 1995.  The basic architecture of Swarm is the 
 > simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this 
 > architecture, a large variety of agent based models can be implemented.  The 
 > Swarm kernel is written in Objective C, and compiles with GCC, and bindings 
 > are available for writing models in both Scheme and Java, and there are 
 > plans to add C++ bindings. 
 > 
 > The Swarm software is available to the general public under the GNU General 
 > Public License (GPL). Swarm is experimental software, which means that it\'s 
 > complete enough to be useful but is under development.  The current (stable) 
 > release of Swarm is 2.1.1.  All software required to build Swarm itself and 
 > build models written in Swarm is free software, available under the GPL.
 > 
 > The Swarm Development Group (SDG) located at http://www.swarm.org/, is a 
 > 501c(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the 
 > state-of-the-art in multi agent based simulation through the continued 
 > advancement of the Swarm Simulation System and support of the Swarm user 
 > community.  The mission statement for the SDG can be found at: 
 > http://www.swarm.org/sdg.html
 > 
 > It already exists and you can see it at http://www.swarm.org/

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
12 bd  Magenta         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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        GPG Public Key: http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt