[roenby]

I'm curious:

In the current state of the OpenFOAM Wikipedia entry[1] it says:

"Original author(s): Henry Weller"

Can some of the foam'ers who have been around since the beginning please enlighten me. Is this the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFOAM

[elvis]

Hi,

well Henry Weller was the first person who developed FOAM
a brief history of FOAM or OpenFOAM that leaves out the name of (Prof.) Hrvoje Jasak can be read http://cfd.direct/openfoam/
another story on OpenFOAM including the the name of Hrvoje Jasak one of the first persons working on the development of FOAM or OpenFOAM can be read
http://wikki.gridcore.se/company/about-us

some authors are listed
http://www.openfoam.org/version2.3.1/
OpenFOAM v2.3.1 was produced by Henry Weller, Mattijs Janssens, Chris Greenshields, Andy Heather, William Bainbridge and Sergio Ferraris. Thanks to the OpenFOAM enthusiasts who have contributed to a better code through the bug reporting system.

for the OF-extend world you can see the contributors (see file ListOfContributors),
http://sourceforge.net/p/openfoam-ex...OfContributors

Do you point on those posts as you ask for the original author?
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post286703
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post286922

[hjasak]

I can easily give you three pieces of evidence that Mr. Weller tries to suppress every day since 2004:

My PhD Thesis: Jasak, H.: Error analysis and estimation in the Finite Volume method with applications to fluid flows, Imperial College, University of London, 1996

A company called Nabla Ltd, the actual owner of the FOAM source code (Companies House, 2000-2006, number 3775453.

foam2.3.2: copyright statement, authorship signatures in the source code and list of contributors.

Also, have a look at OpenFOAM-1.0 list of contributors and notice how it misteriously disappeared (in violation of GPL, that we hear so much about):

10. List of Contributors
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Henry Weller
Hrvoje Jasak
Chris Greenshields
Mattijs Janssens
Niklas Nordin
Eugene De Villiers
Gavin Tabor
Zeljko Tukovic
Tommaso Lucchini
David Hill
Niklas Wikstrom
Hilary Spencer
Andy Heather
Henrik Rusche

I guess that's enough for the moment. There is also a bunch of legal docs, but I don't think you are that much interested...

Hrv

[roenby]

Thanks for your replies Elvis and Hrvoje.

Just for the fun of it I downloaded the first and last foam version made public by powerlab and counted the number of occurences of "Jasak" and "Weller" in the source code:

wget http://powerlab.fsb.hr/ped/kturbo/Op...6_19_01_01.tgz
tar -xzf foam1.9.6_19_01_01.tgz

wget http://powerlab.fsb.hr/ped/kturbo/Op...3_28_10_04.tgz
tar -xzf foam2.3_28_10_04.tgz

and then:

find foam2.3 -name "*.[H,C]" | xargs grep -i "Jasak" | wc -l
1098
find foam2.3 -name "*.[H,C]" | xargs grep -i "Weller" | wc -l
2076

find foam1.9.6 -name "*.[H,C]" | xargs grep -i "Jasak" | wc -l
62
find foam1.9.6 -name "*.[H,C]" | xargs grep -i "Weller" | wc -l
1163

Whatever that tells...

I guess it all comes down to the exact definition of "Original author(s)" of an ever evolving source code.

Anyway, it seems strange to me that the only names mentioned in the "History" section of the Wikipedia OpenFOAM entry are Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields and Mattijs Janssens.

Cheers,
Johan

[vitor.geraldes@ist.utl.pt]

Originally Posted by elvis

Hi,

well Henry Weller was the first person who developed FOAM
a brief history of FOAM or OpenFOAM that leaves out the name of (Prof.) Hrvoje Jasak can be read http://cfd.direct/openfoam/
another story on OpenFOAM including the the name of Hrvoje Jasak one of the first persons working on the development of FOAM or OpenFOAM can be read
http://wikki.gridcore.se/company/about-us

some authors are listed
http://www.openfoam.org/version2.3.1/
OpenFOAM v2.3.1 was produced by Henry Weller, Mattijs Janssens, Chris Greenshields, Andy Heather, William Bainbridge and Sergio Ferraris. Thanks to the OpenFOAM enthusiasts who have contributed to a better code through the bug reporting system.

for the OF-extend world you can see the contributors (see file ListOfContributors),
http://sourceforge.net/p/openfoam-ex...OfContributors

Do you point on those posts as you ask for the original author?
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post286703
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post286922

Thanks for posting this historical code. I made the same search, but on the source code (src). There are 902 files written by Weller and 49 by Jasak & Weeler and 12 by Jasak. Whatever that tells...

[hjasak]

I do not usually go into things like this, so I will limit it only to basic facts. There are people with an agenda to keep this secret or distort the facts, but fortunately there are enough people who remember how FOAM really started.

The first lines of FOAM were written by a guy called Charlie Hill as a part of his PhD into computer graphics and presentation of CFD results on modern workstations in early 1990s in prof Gosman's group. The code was converted/developed into a basic CFD code in late 1993 and the first-ever simulation was a shedding flow around a cylinder in December 1993. I started working on the code around September 1993, firstly to have visualisation capability for an old heap of Fortran and then I switched (with Henry) to FOAM for my PhD work.

All the basic development stuff happened in the next 3-4 years and Jasak and Weller carried on working for full 11 years, developing this code together. The file signatures aren't really representative because up to about 2001 all headers named Weller as the author, even if he did not write them.

In 2000, Jasak and Weller started a company called Nabla Ltd which lasted until 2006 and was doing ALL FOAM development - I was the technical director. The estimate of the code base authorship at this point (Sep/2000) was 80% Weller and 20% Jasak - which I think was fair. At the end of Nabla, the estimate for the code base, with signatures etc was 60% Weller, 35% Jasak and 5% other authors (we had eg. FoamX), which was again fair.

With the start of OpenCFD, Weller and Greenshieds start pretending nothing of this ever happened and the code "just appeared out of nowhere". The file signatures from Jasak are deleted from the code (see GPL violation) and OpenCFD claims ownership - which they do not actually hold. I will leave the dirty linen out of this story; if you want to know more, ask me in person and buy me a glass of wine!

If you want a good NEUTRAL record, find a paper in Notices of American Mathematical Society:

OpenFOAM for Computational Fluid Dynamics
Goong Chen, Qingang Xiong, Philip J. Morris, Eric G. Paterson,
Alexey Sergeev, and Yi-Ching Wang
Notices of the AMS, V61 n 4

Chris Greenshields threatened to sue the publisher (American Mathematical Society) over of the brief paragraph on the history of OpenFOAM, until the publisher told him to sod off.

I don't feel like righting the old wrongs and everyone knows that stuff that's written on the internet is not always true. To this day, you can see my record and contribution to OpenFOAM in my daily work, including Wikki and my research group at Uni Zagreb:

http://www.fsb.hr/cfd

Have fun,

Hrv

[olesen]

Originally Posted by hjasak

...

Also, have a look at OpenFOAM-1.0 list of contributors and notice how it misteriously disappeared (in violation of GPL, that we hear so much about):

10. List of Contributors
...

The list has been reinstated (belated, but there):
https://develop.openfoam.com/Develop...ONTRIBUTORS.md

[olesen]

Note that I've opened an issue https://bugs.openfoam.org/view.php?id=3575 with the following text:

Accurate Code Provenance

During the period 2008 to 2011, I authored and contributed code to the OpenFOAM code base (as acknowledged in the release notes for versions 1.6 to 2.0), but which has never been reflected in the source code contents, and effectively suppressed in the git repository published by the Foundation.

It is to be noted that since contributions were authored within Germany the copyright is non-transferrable (as correctly noted in 2.2 of the contributor agreement). Since I have never signed a Contributor Agreement (or equivalent) to waive my rights, I request that my rights as stipulated by section 13 of the Urheberrechtsgesetz (German Act on Copyright and Related Rights) be respected.

"The author has the right to be identified as the author of the work. He may determine whether the work shall bear a designation of authorship and which designation is to be used."

The authorship designation shall have the form

Copyright (C) date-range Mark Olesen

to be located in header of the files in question. The designation shall appear in chronologically sorted order where other authorship (copyright) designations appear in the file headers to avoid an implicit devaluation or denigration of the contribution.

[PositronCascade]

Originally Posted by olesen

Note that I've opened an issue https://bugs.openfoam.org/view.php?id=3575 with the following text:

Accurate Code Provenance

During the period 2008 to 2011, I authored and contributed code to the OpenFOAM code base (as acknowledged in the release notes for versions 1.6 to 2.0), but which has never been reflected in the source code contents, and effectively suppressed in the git repository published by the Foundation.

It is to be noted that since contributions were authored within Germany the copyright is non-transferrable (as correctly noted in 2.2 of the contributor agreement). Since I have never signed a Contributor Agreement (or equivalent) to waive my rights, I request that my rights as stipulated by section 13 of the Urheberrechtsgesetz (German Act on Copyright and Related Rights) be respected.

"The author has the right to be identified as the author of the work. He may determine whether the work shall bear a designation of authorship and which designation is to be used."

The authorship designation shall have the form

Copyright (C) date-range Mark Olesen

to be located in header of the files in question. The designation shall appear in chronologically sorted order where other authorship (copyright) designations appear in the file headers to avoid an implicit devaluation or denigration of the contribution.

It seems that the link is not working or the issue is deleted.

[olesen]

Originally Posted by PositronCascade

It seems that the link is not working or the issue is deleted.

Yes, it seems that the issue has been deleted without comment and my bug report account disabled or removed

[guin]

Originally Posted by olesen

Yes, it seems that the issue has been deleted without comment and my bug report account disabled or removed

I can confirm that the Mark's issue report was there last week (I've read it). I am also surprised of its removal without any answer/comments.

EDIT: I don't mean to agree nor disagree with Mark's claim regarding the authorship copyrights, which is not my business.

[olesen]

Originally Posted by guin

I can confirm that the Mark's issue report was there last week (I've read it). I am also surprised of its removal without any answer/comments.

EDIT: I don't mean to agree nor disagree with Mark's claim regarding the authorship copyrights, which is not my business.

The not quite so open part of opensource...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quite...e-mark-olesen/

[gschaider]

Originally Posted by olesen

Note that I've opened an issue https://bugs.openfoam.org/view.php?id=3575 with the following text:

Accurate Code Provenance

During the period 2008 to 2011, I authored and contributed code to the OpenFOAM code base (as acknowledged in the release notes for versions 1.6 to 2.0), but which has never been reflected in the source code contents, and effectively suppressed in the git repository published by the Foundation.

It is to be noted that since contributions were authored within Germany the copyright is non-transferrable (as correctly noted in 2.2 of the contributor agreement). Since I have never signed a Contributor Agreement (or equivalent) to waive my rights, I request that my rights as stipulated by section 13 of the Urheberrechtsgesetz (German Act on Copyright and Related Rights) be respected.

"The author has the right to be identified as the author of the work. He may determine whether the work shall bear a designation of authorship and which designation is to be used."

The authorship designation shall have the form

Copyright (C) date-range Mark Olesen

to be located in header of the files in question. The designation shall appear in chronologically sorted order where other authorship (copyright) designations appear in the file headers to avoid an implicit devaluation or denigration of the contribution.

The fascinating thing is that there is a history of Intellectual property https://openfoam.org/ip-history/ that does in no way speak about what the state of the IP was before 2011. It seems it appeared out of thin air and was immediately transferred.
As far as I remember it didn't appear out of thin air. So it would be great to have a history of that as well. Especially the "single copyright holder" part. After 2011 when people were asked to transfer the copyright of their contributions I understand it. But before that I'm not aware of such an agreement (and never was asked for such an agreement post-factum. Although to be fair: my contributions to the core were not that big. So maybe they forgot about it)

Also: even for the part where the history is there (2011-2015) it would be good to have more information than selected quotes from documents


Because of this situation I decided a long time ago that I put most of my stuff into separate projects and not bother to try and put them into one of the three "distros" (Foundation, ESI, foam-extend although the later 2 are much more transparent in which contributor contributed what and also do not have a "not invented here" attitude). Because: why bother to make my code conform to the current convention just to have every trace removed who originally did this

[wyldckat]

My somewhat quick'ish 2 cents:

Originally Posted by gschaider

The fascinating thing is that there is a history of Intellectual property https://openfoam.org/ip-history/ that does in no way speak about what the state of the IP was before 2011. It seems it appeared out of thin air and was immediately transferred.

When looking at this page from far away, it is as good as if the OpenFOAM Foundation had been a third-party unrelated to OpenFOAM's inception when it started (e.g. OpenOffice from Sun/Oracle to Apache Software Foundation), then this history page specifies what the Foundation knows about and had access to. Prior to that, it would be the responsibility of OpenCFD to provide that information, even after transferring the source code's copyright.

Originally Posted by gschaider

As far as I remember it didn't appear out of thin air. So it would be great to have a history of that as well.

Git history made available by ESI-OpenCFD: https://github.com/OpenCFD/OpenFOAM-history/
Quoting from their history page: https://openfoam.com/history/

22/09/2015 - OpenCFD publishes its development line as the OpenFOAM-history repository

I vaguely remember seeing a page at openfoam.org where it was indicated how to ask for IP details on certain parts of the code... but either I dreamed about it or I simply I'm in too much of a hurry to find it again...


As best and far as I can see, all of this code was developed by humans and it is part of the human nature to make mistakes, given that what is logic for one human, is not entirely as logical for another one... "boundary conditions and modeling vs quality of results we can aim for in due time" comes to mind...
And in the defense to keep the OpenFOAM code open source forever and available to all, mistakes were made throughout its history.
My concern now is whether all responsible parties are willing to take the best choices for everyone, not just themselves... given that we don't have a King Solomon to be all wise and have the power of putting things in their correct and rightful places once and for all.

The somewhat funny+sad thing is that in some 50 years from now, none of this will matter, because all of the people involved in the pre-2011 authorship/IP mess will likely have passed away, while those who survive it can choose to re-write history either way.

Best regards,
Bruno

[olesen]

Hi Bruno, you've raised some interesting points. I'm pleased to see you weighing in with your views.

Originally Posted by wyldckat

When looking at this page from far away, it is as good as if the OpenFOAM Foundation had been a third-party unrelated to OpenFOAM's inception when it started (e.g. OpenOffice from Sun/Oracle to Apache Software Foundation), then this history page specifies what the Foundation knows about and had access to. Prior to that, it would be the responsibility of OpenCFD to provide that information, even after transferring the source code's copyright.

From "far away" it could appear that the OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd is a third-party unrelated to OpenFOAM's inception and that OpenCFD would now have the responsibility to provide information about the copyrights. However, we know that the majority of the Foundation directors were simultaneously in leading positions at OpenCFD when OpenCFD transferred its copyrights and its intellectual property rights to the Foundation. It is surely reasonable to expect that they (in their OpenCFD capacity) provided code provenance information to themselves (in their Foundation capacity).

EDIT: The relevant commit associated with the transfer: https://github.com/olesenm/OpenFOAM-...f2982d1086453b

Originally Posted by wyldckat

The somewhat funny+sad thing is that in some 50 years from now, none of this will matter, because all of the people involved in the pre-2011 authorship/IP mess will likely have passed away, while those who survive it can choose to re-write history either way.

We may not need to wait that long for history to be rewritten (or at least erased).
The history of the Foundation site is excluded from archiving (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://openfoam.org), which makes it easier.

[olesen]

Since the bug report failed, now filed as a merge request onto their repository:
https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-dev/pull/32

[wyldckat]

Hi Mark,

I better open this post with this statement: I'm in no position to answer as if I worked for or at the OpenFOAM Foundation, therefore what I write here is only what I know from the various parties (mostly based on public information), in how this whole situation can be perceived by all parties... so this is somewhat my perspective, as someone who tries to see from all perspectives. That said, I will not address all perspectives, given that I'm in no condition to do that either...

So, what I can point out right off the bat as "flaws" in your approach:

1. The pull request is categorically better for the public to see what files you are referring to and I believe that the PR cannot be deleted by the Foundation, unless Github is approached with a valid DMCA, if I'm not mistaken...
2. No pull requests via Github have been accepted on this repository by the OpenFOAM Foundation, at least as far as I can see in the public history of this specific repository.
3. Some of the pull requests are commented on with the indication that the contributions are to be done in accordance to what is written here: https://bugs.openfoam.org/rules.php
4. By this definition, neither your bug/issue report nor the pull request fit the requirements on that page... i.e. it does not contribute to the code itself, it's "only" a statement of copyright/authorship. Quoting from said rules page as an example:
   

   Resolution for All
   
   OpenFOAM has thousands of users working across a very broad range of applications, in industry and academia.
   When working to resolve an issue, please respect the fact that changes to OpenFOAM must take account of the needs of all its users.

5. Why isn't the latest master branch at openfoam.com not include the pull request you've issued?
6. Why isn't all of the code at openfoam.com that you've contributed to, follow the same convention you've requested from the OpenFOAM Foundation?

So, please keep in mind that I'll leave it up to you to defend your side on why the preservation of original authors and copyrights should be preserved in the interest of everyone, but I'll be somewhat playing here on the other side of the perspective of this whole ordeal...

One of the concepts/ideas/notions/perspectives about abstaining from stating names directly in the code of who authored what, is that there is a maintenance overhead/cost associated to it. The extreme scenario is that a particular class may be revised so many times over a span of several years, that one or more author's code lines is effectively removed from the the class and therefore no longer authored/copyrighten by that author... hence it would be erroneous to preserve the name of that person in that file, when all code is removed.

• The defensibly of this position is that the OpenFOAM Foundation already has enough difficulty getting enough funding for the tasks at hand, let alone having to maintain who authored what, when and how... therefore, letting things documented by automated mechanisms sounds "good enough" and "cost efficient" and "overall good for everyone", hence it's possible to do archeology and find out who contributed what, e.g.: https://github.com/OpenCFD/OpenFOAM-history/ - a very nice place to find out what came from where, at least starting at the time of the repository's first commit.

Therefore, it's possible to defend that the authors names are not being hidden, they are simply not being advertised on the code, simply because... it's not practical to do so. Yes, somewhat of a weak defense, I know, but still... it's a defense of sorts.

This does sound like a fairly annoying and a not acceptable conduct, but I'm not aware of anyone stepping in as a self-funded code historian of the OpenFOAM source code, to preserve in its entirety the code's authorship. Or to explicit contribute money solely to preserve people's names.
What has happened is that authors have had to defend their parts of the code they contributed, even though some parts of it have been re-written since then... albeit many not completely... but still having a good part of their footprint reduced as time goes on and new standards are adopted. Borderline situations were where the code had to be re-written so much, that the original authorship was as good as an algorithm sheet on a paper/article... or simply removed for not confirming to maintenance standards and being too much of a burden to keep in the code.

From an economical perspective, it could be defensible that even though your pull request could be accepted, a new repository could also then be started anew (pending funding), with all of your contributions purged from it and new code re-written to replace it... preferably based on newer C++ standards.

• VFAT32 comes to mind, where years ago when there was a patent or copyright issue on TomTom's software (on the VFAT32 code) and others that used it... and within a few hours the code was replaced with new code that re-implemented the legally-compromised functions.

The other side of the economical defense would be: What costs more? Re-writing code past contributed code that does not meet the copyright request or periodically/permanently maintaining all original author's names? On all thousands of source code files?

The maintenance of said names could even be automatic with bots, but those bots still need to be created and maintained if/when they mess up.

Now, let me try and find again something I read about the Linux Kernel and drivers... OK, they have these two pages:

• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/CREDITS
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/bl...er/MAINTAINERS

Bah, I can't find it... I know I read years ago something about old maintainers' names would not be kept in the current MAINTAINERS list, it only mattered the current maintainers...

• Either way, the copyrights of several files are indeed somewhat maintained, from I can briefly see on the Linux Kernel.

Uh.. I've run out of mental steam... the idea I'm trying to convey here is that this whole situation sucks, from several perspectives. I have in the past and can come up with several possible solutions for past situations and present situations, but the neither one of them will likely be accepted... so... now what do we do


Oh, right... Copyright-wise, it's something that can/should taken to court or at least legal action should be taken, period. The outcome will likely not going to fully make peace with all sides, but then again, the legal courts is what we have closest to a King Solomon.

Either way, making claims publicly can also be taken to court for slander, so...


I'm tired, I'm going to go take a nap... I need my rest... and this isn't my battle... it's just that I've seen this from several sides and the current path on this thread does not seem like one that will lead to anyone's victory I do care for everyone's work on the OpenFOAM community and I do wish I could have boosted a merger of all forks, but alas it wasn't to be so.

Keeping things as they are isn't entirely acceptable either, but neither is allowing people to starve and be homeless throughout the world... no, not a defense here, just a statement of the current reality And yes, I'm thinking on how to work on the latter one for several years now as well... there is so much work to be done, why is this still happening?

Best regards,
Bruno

[hjasak]

There is a history of Copyright theft and suppression of authorship, from the day FOAM was taken out of Nabla Ltd. (illegally) and I regret to say that Mark is not the only one whose authorship has been suppressed.

Regarding the original authorship (Bruno), I plan to live for another 50 years at least, so the story will not be forgotten. The issue was taken to the Metropolitan Police in London in 2005 and the documents I filed with the Police are a matter of public record.

Happy to keep repeating the story for however long it takes: this is a blatant case of Copyright theft.

Hrvoje Jasak

[HPE]

Filing a complaint does not equate to a decision from a judge as far as I know, and everyone is innocent until found guilty by a judge due to the presumption of innocence principle. Were there any further action after filing the complaint to the police? Any prosecution, anyone convicted of a crime of the sort?

[hjasak]

Yes of course. The case paperwork was presented to a Queen's Counsel (this is English for a prosecuting attorney appointed by the Government) who spoke to me in detail, having described this as "the clearest case of fraud he has seen in 10 years". However, the Crown has not pressed the case. Their performance is measured based on funds recovered and a quick check has shown that neither of the defendents did not have sufficient property or funds to be seized to justify the effort of public prosecution. The total value of fraud was in tens of millions of pounds.

I was offered a chance to start a private prosecution instead, at the initial cost (money I need to put down for the prosecution to start) of GBP 136,000. This would be recovered to me when the judgement was passed. I have decided to pay for my son's private education instead.
So, if you would like see a formal judgement against the people who committed this fraud, kindly put up GBP 136k and I am happy to support you in court.

As for me, I have case paperwork in my cupboard and I know what happened. I also know that dozens of criminals walk away from court unconvicted and I have better things to do with my life. It is sufficient to know I am not the only one whose property has been stolen by this bunch and when I see people in the same situation - like Mark - I will support them.

I can see from your signature that you understand the meaning of Community and contribution - which is all that matters.

Hrv