Posting information about open source codes
 

Hi all,

I've noticed that some of the listings in the codes section just copy-paste the information written on the original websites. Should we have any copyright issues with this?

I suggest we just copy a very small description and mention where it was taken from.

For example, http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Visit and this is the original website http://www.llnl.gov/visit/about.html

Of course, we're not expected to write somehting totally original about these open-source codes, but i believe we shouldn't copy everything.

What do you suggest?

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

Everything people put in CFD-Wiki must be freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Hence, just copying something that someone else owns the copyright to is not good. The original author can of course license his own work under the GNU Free Documentation License also and thereby allow us to add it to CFD-Wiki.

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

This is perhaps taking things in a different direction, but it is not clear to me that we need to have lengthy pages here describing any of the codes. In additional to the Visit example you cited, the current page describing Gridgen is way too long (and apparently mainly written by Pointwise people, not that there is anything wrong with that). In my opinion, we should either

a) eliminate description pages entirely and just link on the codes page or

b) impose some meaningful limit on the description page length.

I don't have anything against a short summary of the capability of a code, but in my opinion detailed lists of features don't belong here.

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

I am for a brief description of these resources (100 words?).

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

100 words might be too short - according to wc, the first paragraph on the Visit page is 120 words, and the first two paragraphs look like a pretty reasonable description to me. I did some trimming of the first two paragraphs, and got 178 words. So 200 or 250 might be a better limit to allow for some variation, and we should impose that on all the software descriptions.

Even so, my cut-down version does not pass the copyright test (which was your original point). From a quick investigation, it appears that the US government would have the copyright on this text. Regardless of whether or not we decide to go with a word limit, this text should come down.

Jason

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

I second that.

Re: Posting information about open source codes
 

I was out of town for the last 1.5 weeks, so during that time I looked through the pages and made a list of the pages I thought need to be trimmed (for length or copyright reasons). I didn't do word counts - I just looked at the pages to see which ones seemed too long. Given that one of these pages (the Gridgen one) got edited recently, I thought it would be better to make a posting on this before acting. In that case, we could probably just ask the Pointwise people to trim it ~250 words rather than just zapping it.

These are the cases that (in my opinion) need to be looked at (marginal cases):

*Gerris

*Engauge Digitizer

*CFD-FASTRAN

These are the cases that (in my opinion) need to be shortened (clear-cut cases):

*OpenFlower

*Visit

*Gifsicle

*Gridgen

Should we put an official word limit somewhere in the editing guide, or just put a semi-official guideline somewhere on the Codes page? I favor the second option, since we should also add something about copyright there to ward off reruns of the Visit situation.

Jason