<h1>The deal.II license</h1>
<p>
- The <acronym>deal.II</acronym> library has been placed under an Open Source
- license, in the sense advocated by the
- <a href="http://www.opensource.org" target="_top">Open Source
+ The <acronym>deal.II</acronym> library has been placed under an Open
+ Source license, in the sense advocated by the <a
+ href="http://www.opensource.org" target="_top">Open Source
Initiative</a>. You are thus free to copy and use it, and you have
free access to all source codes. However, <acronym>deal.II</acronym>
- is not in the public domain, it is property of and copyrighted by the
- <acronym>deal.II</acronym> authors, and there are restrictions on
- its use. The legally binding license <a href="#license-text">is
- given at the bottom of this page</a>.
- Furthermore, deal.II distributions come bundled with some third
- party software for which the deal.II authors do not own the
- copyright. The licenses of these parts are discussed <a
- href="#3rdparty">below</a>.
+ is not in the public domain, it is property of and copyrighted by
+ the <acronym>deal.II</acronym> authors, and there are restrictions
+ on its use. We will give some hints on license issues first. The
+ legally binding license is the <a href="#license-text">Q Public
+ License (QPL)</a> at the bottom of this page. Furthermore, deal.II
+ distributions come bundled with some third party software for which
+ the deal.II authors do not own the copyright. The licenses of these
+ parts are discussed <a href="#3rdparty">below</a>.
<p>
In this document, as well as in the program files, the terms
<i>authors of <acronym>deal.II</acronym></i> and
<i><acronym>deal.II</acronym> authors</i> generally refer to the
- principal authors of the library. These are presently Wolfgang
+ principal authors of the library. These are Wolfgang
Bangerth, Guido Kanschat and Ralf Hartmann.
</p>
Some of the files in the <code>contrib/</code> subdirectory are by
other people, and are distributed under separate licenses. These
files are not part of the <acronym>deal.II</acronym> library, but
- they are distributed together. They are generally available for use
- in non-commercial academic settings. For commercial use and if you
- want to distribute your codes, please consult the licenses of these
- parts of the deal.II distribution.
+ they are part of our distribution. They are generally available for
+ use in non-commercial academic settings. For commercial use and if
+ you want to distribute your codes, please consult the licenses of
+ these parts of the deal.II distribution. For those codes governed by
+ a license critical for commercial use, we made sure that they can be
+ disabled upon configuration of <acronym>deal.II</acronym> without
+ unnecessarily restricting the functionality of the remainder of the
+ library.
<p>
<a href="http://www.troll.no" target="_top">Troll Tech</a> for their
Qt program library, but has since gained some support by other
library authors as well.
- For more information on the QPL, please also consult the following
- links:
- <br>
-    
-    
- <a href="http://www.trolltech.com/licenses/qpl-annotated.html" target="_top">Annotated version</a>
-    
- <a href="http://www.troll.no/qpl/plaintext.txt" target="_top">Plain text version</a>
+ For more information on the QPL, please follow
+ <a href="http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qpl.html" target="_top">this link</a>.
</p>