Light++ Copyright License

Non-military Academic and Personal License

This license is designed to guarantee freedom to share and change software for academic and personal use, but restricting commercial firms and military environments from exploiting knowhow for their own benefit. The precise terms and conditions for using, copying, distribution, and modification follow.

Terms and Conditions for Using, Copying, Distribution, and Modification

The "Program" below refers to source, object and executable code, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. Each licensee is addressed as "you".

    -# This license applies to you only if you are using the software
       privately or as part of non-defense related work for a noncommercial 
       and academic institution, e.g., a university. 
    -# This license explicitely prohibits use of the software by
       employees of military or defense-related organizations, or within
       facilities producing weapons or conducting research on weapon design.
       Any attempt to use the Program within military or defense-related organizations
       or facilities producing weapons or conducting research on weapon design
       or any other military purpose will automatically terminate your rights 
       under this License.  
    -# Every publication and presentation for which work based on the Program
       or its output has been used must contain an appropriate citation and acknowledgement
       of the author(s) of the Program.
    -# You may copy, modify and distribute the Program or work based on the Program
       in source, object, or executable form provided that you also meet all of
       the following conditions:
            -# You must cause any modifications or work derived from the Program
               or any part thereof, that you distribute or publish, 
               to be licensed at no charge under the terms of this License.
               You must accompany it with this unmodified license text.
            -# If a modification or a work derived from the Program requires 
               another component to work properly, you must also cause this
               component to be licensed under the same terms, and this component 
               must be distributed under the same terms as the modification or derived work.
            -# You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating
               that you changed the files and the date of any change.
            -# You must accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
               source code.
              The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
              making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code
              means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated
              interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation
              and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the
              source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed
              (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler,
              kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs.
    -# You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except
       as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy,
       modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program is void and will automatically
       terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received
       copies or rights from you under this License will not have their licenses
       terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
    -# You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed
       it. However, nothing else grants you permission to use, modify, or distribute
       the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law
       if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by using, modifying or distributing
       the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance
       of this License to do so and all its terms and conditions for copying,
       distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
    -# Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program),
       the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor
       to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.
       You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipient's exercise
       of the rights granted herein. (You are not responsible for enforcing compliance
       by third parties to this License.)
    -# If, as a consequence of a court judgement or allegation of patent infringement
       or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are
       imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement, or otherwise) that contradict
       the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions
       of this License.
    -# If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other programs
       whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author(s) to ask for permission.

NO WARRANTY

1. Because the program is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty for the program to the extent permitted by applicable law. The copyright holders provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. Should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair, or correction.
2. In no event will any copyright holder, or any other party who may modify and/or redistribute the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Rationale:

Writing software means to create technology and thereby empowering new potentials. Freedom of software versus proprietary development has already been discussed frequently in the community and is taken care of by various licensing schemes. However, the creation of new technology also comes along with the responsibility of the inventor to decide whom to grant the associated new power. In the domain of physics (nuclear weapons) and biology (genetic design, cloning, stem cells) the ethical component of research and technology is part of the scientific advance progress. However, there is hardly any or no conciousness at all on the ethical impacts of software development. The fight for freedom in favour of Open Source leads to people ignoring that software itself can be used as a weapon itself (in the sense that it allows to create such), and as such it should not necessarily be made available to anyone (do we really want to equip everyone with a gun?). The danger of software being used for purpose that might actually harm people is larger than one might think at the first instance. While creating just another license in the djungle of existing ones cannot change the world, but the main purpose of this license is to at least help increasing the consciousness about this topic.

Open Source license explicitely disallow to restrict the usage of software to a certain group of people or application scenario. In this sense, the Light++ license is not Open Source, though it gives the same rights to private and academic users as others do.

Links (no responsibility is taken for the contents of these pages)

• http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegenel/bluegene_home.html
• Lab to sample Linux for weapons work (from http://news.com.com/2100-1001-959082.html ): Los Alamos National Laboratory is buying a $6 million, 2,048-processor Linux supercomputer to run its nuclear weapons simulation software, an effort that will test the limits of these less expensive megamachines.
• From the POOMA manual (available at http://www.codesourcery.com/public/pooma/manual.pdf ): "By 1998, POOMA was part of the U.S. Department of Energy␛-F¢s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty forbid nuclear weapons testing so they were instead simulated using computers. ASCI¢s goal was to radically advance the state of the art in high-performance computing and numerical simulations so the nuclear weapon simulations could use 100-teraflop parallel computers."
• Open Source Project Disallows Military Use: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/1438204
• Linux use in the Military: http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_papers/tech_papers_01/kenwood_software/kenwood_software.pdf

Citations

Cited from the Open Technology Development Roadmap Plan, Office of Security Review, Department of Defense, June 7th 2006, available under http://www.acq.osd.mil/actd/articles/OTDRoadmapFinal.pdf :

• "Software code has become central to how the war-fighter is able to conduct missions."
• "There are over 100,000 publicly available open source projects (http://sourceforge.net) available spanning most functional areas.4 Many of these projects provide mature and robust solutions in their areas of focus. When possible, OSS components should be leveraged rather than funding the development of equivalent proprietary components for specific programs."

Cited from http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/archive/02-106.shtml

• Dubbed "The Science Appliance" by the Laboratory's researchers, the cluster is a model for future supercomputing systems that will support the Laboratory's mission of stewardship of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.
  • The Linux NetworX cluster will be used solely for unclassified computing, including testing on ASCI-relevant unclassified applications, and will serve as a prototype for future supercomputers that will use simulation and visualization tools to maintain the aging U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without underground nuclear testing. The experimental cluster system will give Los Alamos researchers opportunities to improve the open source software environment, parallel file systems and ancillary operating system software to prepare for future classified supercomputers.
  • "Los Alamos enhances global security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and national security concerns."

Cited from http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/545 :

• "Not preventing military use will make the authors of open source directly responsible for such horrors as occur in the use of high-energy weapons as are being used as I write by Israel in Lebanon." Edward G. Nilges, Aug 15th 2006

Related Articles

Free translations cited from http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/78891/from/rss09 :

• "Unfortunately, many computer scientists are educated as technocrats. They are not told that they are developing programs in a social environment and they need to consider the purpose for which their code could be used." Klaus Brunnstein
• "We computer scientists have no right to speak up against our politicians for driving us into war, because this were not possible without us. If we would not support them, war would be completely different today, and, up to some extent, even impossible." Joseph Weizenbaum
• "Computer scientists do not need to participate everywhere, they indeed can face central moral aspects of their profession." Wolfgang Coy

Comments

If identifiable sections of a whole work that makes use of the Program or any parts thereof, can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, this License does not apply to those sections. A section is considered reasonably independent when it can be used and compiled independently from the Program, and the modified Program can still be used and compiled without this section (even with possibly reduced functionality - a typical example is a plugin loaded at runtime). In other words, if a distributed modification of the Program requires another component, then this component must be distributed under the same License, or the modification of the Program must be such that the Program is still usable without this component.

Werner Benger, © 2005++