copyright

[Malte Helmert]

Dear IPC-2008 group,

as you know (and confirmed when you registered your planner), the
source code of the participating planners will be published on the IPC
website.

As with all publicly available code, it is important that the
conditions under which people can use your code are made clear, and
that they make sense. We thus urge all the teams that haven't done so
yet to include a README file or similar with their planner, which
explains under what conditions the planner may be run, redistributed,
used as a basis for derivative work, etc. The best option is probably
to choose a well-known licence such as the GPL or BSD licence. If your
planner archive doesn't contain licence and copyright information,
please send us a file with such information soon, and we will add it
to the archives.

Some of the planners contain copyright information or restrictions on
reuse that won't work. For example, one team in the temporal track has
a copyright disclaimer that starts with

/
*****************************************************************************
# Copyright (C) 1994 X Consortium

which appears to be copy-pasted from another source. Please change
this to something like

/
*****************************************************************************
# Copyright (C) 2008 Your Names

and send us the corrected version. (There are other references in the
file to the X Consortium and FSF which need to be changed, too.)

Another team's archive contains the following bit:

If you obtained this source code by any means, you can NOT use it
in any ways without
our written permission and should report to us immediately.

This contradicts the requirement that the source code will be
published on the IPC website, so please send us a modified disclaimer.

Finally, many teams include code from other planners (most frequently
FF, but also LPG, Fast Downward, and various versions of Satplan). In
that case, you have to respect any copyright restrictions on the
planners that you build on:

* FF: Please note that FF is distributed under the GPL licence, which
requires that any derived code is also distributed under the GPL. So
if your planner is based on FF, please send us the files necessary for
distributing code under the GPL (a copy of the licence, and a README
file that explains that the code is distributed on the GPL; see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html for more information). The only
case in which you can reuse code from FF without placing your planner
under the GPL is if you have explicit permission from Jörg Hoffmann.
In that case, please notify us.

* Fast Downward: Fast Downward does not have a licence that permits
redistribution, but permission to redistribute Fast Downward code
under the terms of the GPL is hereby granted to the competing teams
that use Fast Downward code. If you do use our code, please add a
notice to your README file or a similar place, which should read
something like "This program uses source code of the Fast Downward
planner, (c) 2003-2004 by Malte Helmert and Silvia Richter. Permission
to redistribute this code under the terms of the GPL has been
granted." If you want to use a different licence than the GPL for your
planner, please contact me.

* LPG/Satplan: I am not sure what licence these are distributed
under, so if you use code from these planners, please contact the
authors to clarify this and tell us about the outcome.

Best regards,

Malte

[Malte Helmert]

Dear IPC-2008 group,

many teams still haven't resolved their copyright issues, so please
let me remind you of this:

> As with all publicly available code, it is important that the conditions under which
> people can use your code are made clear, and that they make sense. We thus
> urge all the teams that haven't done so yet to include a README file or similar
> with their planner, which explains under what conditions the planner may be
> run, redistributed, used as a basis for derivative work, etc. The best option is
> probably to choose a well-known licence such as the GPL or BSD licence. If your
> planner archive doesn't contain licence and copyright information, please send
> us a file with such information soon, and we will add it to the archives.

So if you didn't react to my first message on this topic and your
planner submission didn't contain an acceptable copyright statement
(see my previous mail for examples of copyright statements that are
not acceptable), please send me your copyright information until
Friday, or at least send me an email that explains what is keeping you
up. For example, if you are waiting to get someone's permission to
reuse their code.

I'm planning to go through the list of planners again on the weekend,
in order to individually contact those participants where I still see
copyright problems. Please try not to belong to this group!

Best regards,

Malte