Project 57: Licensing of software

Boulder 1981:
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Brown spoke on "issues in license agreements for numerical program
libraries". His slides are reproduced as IFIP/WG 2.5 (Boulder-28) 828
and a draft of the corresponding paper is IFIP/WG 2.5 (Boulder-35)
835.

Battiste suggested that the group should be suggesting user
protection. We are almost ready for code warranties, needed for
mass-production of ROMs.

Rice remarked that the TOMS protection essentially prohibits 
the reproduction of algorithms for sale as a book.

Ford commented on the divergence of government policies.  In the US,
code produced with government money is in the "public domain" whereas
in Europe there is an attempt to recover capital costs. There is a
danger that the European commercialism will restrict the development
of algorithms. There is also a divergence between the aims of
employers who want a financial return from : their investment and
authors who rant protection of their intellectual property.

Rice felt that this was a matter for other people, not the 
working group.

Argonne 1986:
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Document: IFIP/WG 2.5 (Argonne-23) 1323, 4 pages.

Einarsson briefly presented the current state of the work on the
project. He noted he could not continue to co-chair the project
because of the non-lingual conference work. Ford would not like to
carry the project on his own because of the potential conflict of
interest. Discussion followed. It was agreed that the licensing
problem is not a simple one, and that WG 2.5 should continue to
consider the problem, and discuss principles but not provide any
public documents, at least not until the next meeting (Reid).

Como 1987:
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Einarsson informed the WG 2.5 that although there is vendor interest
in the project he did not believe that the project was suitable as a
IFIP WG 2.5 project topic. He proposed that the project be dropped.