Violation of BSD license terms for Fatiando a Terra code

[leouieda]

Hi @igp-gravity, I found this package today and was a bit surprised to see so much code from Fatiando a Terra copied here without explicit acknowledgement and without our license and copyright notice in the source. While the BSD 3-clause license used in all our projects permits redistribution of the source code, you are required by the license to include the copyright notice and license terms along with the copied code. See https://github.com/fatiando/verde/blob/master/LICENSE.txt for example. It would be courteous if you included a notice in the documentation (docstrings) as well, though you are not required by the license to do so.

In fact, I would encourage you to not copy the code from projects like Verde here (of course, you can do so if you want and follow the license terms). Instead, installing and import verde as a dependency is the best way to do this. You wouldn’t copy the NumPy code into your repository, for example. This is not hard to do and users would get the benefit of the latest developments from Verde when we make new releases. There is a growing ecosystem of geophysics software in Python (fatiando, simpeg, gempy, pygimli) and making code that plays well with the existing packages is a great boost to everyone. geoist has some interesting functionality that would be a great complement to the existing tools without needing to try to include all of them in its own source. This also encourages contributions from experienced open-source developers, like myself and the rest of the Fatiando community who might find geoist useful.

If you have modifications to the library (Verde etc), you should contribute those back to the project so that all can benefit instead of keeping them here. We welcome new contributions and have a comprehensive guide for giving credit to contributors: https://github.com/fatiando/contributing/blob/master/AUTHORSHIP.md

If you need functionality from the fatiando package, please consider helping us port this to the new Harmonica package. We’re working hard to implement filters and modelling/inversion code but time is limited and we could use some help.

Thank you for writing open-source code and making your work public! It’s always great to see more of this. I hope you consider my suggestions above since open-source works best when it’s done as a community. If not, then please at least follow the BSD license terms.

[steveshichen]

Hi, Uieda: Thanks for your cautions. Before we prepared to develop the Geoist open-source python package, we investigated the relevant geophysical open source software include Fatiando, simpeg and pygimli, etc. We find the functions of Fatiando is close to our wanted and so many useful and fundamental classes and functions has been well written in Fatiando a Terra. However, we also noticed the Fatiando a Terra has not been updated or further developed since March 2018. The LICENSE.txt (https://github.com/fatiando/fatiando/blob/master/LICENSE.txt) was Copyright (c) 2012-2016 Leonardo Uieda. Therefore, Geoist selected directly some part of fundamental modules and python code from the Fatiando a Terra in Github to start a new project. We respected for your works and high-quality coding and framework design in Fatiando a Terra. We accept your advise and will acknowledge the Fatiando and add the copyright notice in next verison as soon as possible. The aim of Geoist project focused on the potential field data processing and inversion with open-source form and provided the long-term maintenance and supporting for prototype study. Your comments and suggestions will make us do better. Thanks again. Steve From: Leonardo Uieda Date: 2020-08-23 18:40 To: igp-gravity/geoist CC: Subscribed Subject: [igp-gravity/geoist] Violation of BSD license terms for Fatiando a Terra code (#7) Hi @igp-gravity, I found this package today and was a bit surprised to see so much code from Fatiando a Terra copied here without explicit acknowledgement and without our license and copyright notice in the source. While the BSD 3-clause license used in all our projects permits redistribution of the source code, you are required by the license to include the copyright notice and license terms along with the copied code. See https://github.com/fatiando/verde/blob/master/LICENSE.txt for example. It would be courteous if you included a notice in the documentation (docstrings) as well, though you are not required by the license to do so. In fact, I would encourage you to not copy the code from projects like Verde here (of course, you can do so if you want and follow the license terms). Instead, installing and import verde as a dependency is the best way to do this. You wouldn’t copy the NumPy code into your repository, for example. This is not hard to do and users would get the benefit of the latest developments from Verde when we make new releases. There is a growing ecosystem of geophysics software in Python (fatiando, simpeg, gempy, pygimli) and making code that plays well with the existing packages is a great boost to everyone. geoist has some interesting functionality that would be a great complement to the existing tools without needing to try to include all of them in its own source. This also encourages contributions from experienced open-source developers, like myself and the rest of the Fatiando community who might find geoist useful. If you have modifications to the library (Verde etc), you should contribute those back to the project so that all can benefit instead of keeping them here. We welcome new contributions and have a comprehensive guide for giving credit to contributors: https://github.com/fatiando/contributing/blob/master/AUTHORSHIP.md If you need functionality from the fatiando package, please consider helping us port this to the new Harmonica package. We’re working hard to implement filters and modelling/inversion code but time is limited and we could use some help. Thank you for writing open-source code and making your work public! It’s always great to see more of this. I hope you consider my suggestions above since open-source works best when it’s done as a community. If not, then please at least follow the BSD license terms. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.