Extend Project Release 1.6-ext
The Extend Project Release 1.6-ext The OpenFOAMŪ-Extend Project (http://www.extend-project.de/) announces the release of version 1.6-ext, in the line of previous -dev community releases. OpenFOAM-1.6-ext is a formal release of the community developments in the OpenFOAM software library, following the establishment of the -Extend Project and web portal. This release includes many improvements, including an automatic test harness which provides basic quality control by running OpenFOAM over a growing suite of tutorials and test cases. Fundamental developments
This section lists the applications that existed in versions of OpenFOAM but were abandoned by OpenCFD due to lack of expertise/resources. In some cases, code may still be present but it is buggy or unusable. The -Extend project line maintains, validates and develops the features in contact with original authors and contributes new features and bug fixes.
The number of cumulative bug fixes compared to OpenFOAM-1.6.x is over 5000; we will stop counting. Release You can access the public git repository at: git clone git://openfoam-extend.git.sourceforg...enFOAM-1.6-ext Binary release for the Linux and Mac OS X version, Debian rpm packages and bootable USB stick are in preparation and will be available for download from the SourceForge server. For further details, please see the README file in the release or visit the Extend project portal: http://www.extend-project.de/ |
Great news. I will take a look into this soon.
Regards Bastian. |
Thank you Hrv.
this year X-mas is very early ;-). |
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Additionally, if you refer to the follow FAQs from the Free Software Foundation
This is presumably not at all in our collective interest. |
Yes, really great news!
I have an immediate question: What does "Parallelisation of topological change engine" mean in practice? I have a situation where I would like to use a sliding mesh across several processor boundaries. Is such a situation now possible? Again, great work, K |
Hi Mark,
thanks for your input. Sorry, no irony here...
best regards, |
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About the list of contribution, for the last releases (since git was used), it could be reconstructed, at least in part, using the release notes and the git logs (a bit painful). |
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Hello Mark,
Here is a piece of data for you: a header of the polyMesh.H from foam2.3.2. Please have a look at the Copyright statement, name of the company, date and the name and surname of the author. I can confirm that the code has been written personally by me, the idea is mine, as is the implementation, validation, testing, mesh conversion, manipulation etc. The code is 6 years old - please run a diff on the latest copy of polyMesh.H that you are using every day and tell me what you see in terms of authorship. In any case, this no longer matters: we should attribute the authorship and copyright to their rightful owners and while this may take time and effort it is The Right Thing To Do. Please also have another read a the FSF link you posted: Quote:
As an interim measure, we can add either a copyright disclaimer or transfer copyright to the FSF as suggested by the document. However, my time is spent better working on the software and I will end my discussion here. |
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I'm glad to see that you are following the discussion, however apart from reasserting a copyright contention for a piece of code written between 1991-2004, you did not actually address the central point which I will restate here: Quote:
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What a minute, doesn't the wording "Copyright held by original author", cover the original author?
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Unfortunately this is not something we can ignore, because it affected all of us in these years (too long IMHO). Best, |
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well, let's keep calm. Neither the statement "Copyright (C) 1991-20xx OpenCFD Ltd." nor "Copyright held by original author" is complete. However, the first statement is additionally wrong, since it has been placed as headers of **all** files, thus claiming copyright for the entire code. Moreover, this does in no way reflect the original authorship (which should be mentioned!). All in all, OpenCFD seems to claim leadership in terms of all aspects of intellectual property, which is not right for sure. So, what's about the above approach of a contributor database holding these information? This is all we have to add, IMO, since this is the information rendering the statement "Copyright held by original author" incomplete. With a database maintained by all original contributors (each responsible for their own contribution(s)) this issue is sorted out, isn't it? best regards, Holger |
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There is another case which could make their choice acceptable, but it is probably not the case. If the development of the code went on under the umbrella of a company (Nabla), there could have been an agreement saying that the code was owned by the company. At this point everything becomes more confused, since the company split, and there was no clarification when this happened. Quote:
Reconstructing this is really a lot of work, and probably not worth if there is no intention of a legal litigation (a disaster). If I had to do this myself, I would simply add my copyright to the files I worked on, keeping the copyright statement of OpenCFD, but removing the brand and the sentences "This file is part of OpenFOAM". I am doing something similar for what I put in my git repo. An example of the header I use follows: Code:
/*---------------------------------------------------------------------------*\ Best, Alberto |
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Purely out of curiosity: do you really apply the same approach -- ie, "Copyright original author" approach with a separate authorship list -- for your own projects or your dissertation? |
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Assuming files contained author names at that point, this discussion, that lasted for years, could be easily concluded once for all if a copy of the FOAM code, with the original copyright statements, was made available. Given the events related to the release of FOAM as open project, I hope both the involved parts conserved it with care. Without it, we can keep speculating forever, with all the annoying consequence. We all know who developed what after the first release of OpenFOAM, since we have release notes, svn/git repositories, and contributions were clearly separated. The discussion is on what happened before the OpenFOAM era, in the FOAM era. So, at this point, the very simple question is: "Does a copy of the original FOAM code, before it became OpenFOAM, exist? If so, who has it?" Best, |
Hi Mark,
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The database was intended as a tool to reconstruct all missing information about the original authorship for all files. This information in turn might be used to put the right copyright note in place. In case, you consider this as insufficient and do know any better way to gather these seemingly lost data, please let me know. best regards, |
Easy. I have got ALL copies of all releases of FOAM between 2000 and 2004 and as a director and co-owner of Nabla Ltd. I don't think there is a problem with making them public. Further to that, I also have all internal/private source code snapshots used by various people at Imperial, Chalmers, Poly Milano, Uni Zagreb and my own PhD (foam-1.51, Oct 1995), so there is no problem with the history. In fact, it would be good to dump this off my machine anyway - I will make a directory on the FSB PowerLab server and we can find a better place for it in the future.
So, FOAM before OpenFOAM historical releases are available on http://powerlab.fsb.hr/ped/kturbo/Op...oricalReleases for all to peruse at their pleasure. It will take a while, but if The Public requires is, Thy Will Be Done. Please suggest a better location, I don't think the server will take the load :) I hope this is the end of discussion - with this data, everyone can make their own judgement. Hrv |
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sed -i -e 's!Copyright (C) .* OpenCFD Ltd.!Copyright held by original author!g' $1 http://openfoam-extend.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=openfoam-extend/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext;a=blob_plain;f=bin/foamChangeCopyright;hb=HEAD Unfortunately I cannot find a corresponding commit showing the elimination of these copyrights in the extend project. |
How much room is required?
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When Nabla was dissolved is irrelevant, if the files contain the authors' name. However 2004 is the correct date, since after that OpenFOAM was released by OpenCFD(r) Ltd (from OpenCFD website).
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The other part of the problem is that it seems also OpenCFD is releasing code without the proper copyright statement, at least based on the information made available publicly, which is, once again, uni-lateral. What is (was?) missing to reconstruct the actual authorship/copyright is only the original copyright statement of what was done in the pre-OpenFOAM era. With this information, re-establishing the actual copyright is a long and annoying work, but it is not impossible, and it could finally put an end to this situation, which OpenCFD surely could have avoided from day 1, being a bit more flexible and welcoming towards contributors, which should not be forced to give up on their authorship to see, maybe, their code included in OpenFOAM. On a side, a bit off-topic, note: http://www.openfoam.com/news/6th-anniversary.php It seems they forgot that Blender, Ubuntu, Wordpress and Android have an ocean of contributors, not required to have a contract to submit lines of code, and actually helped by the company behind the project. :D |
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