ROMS/TOMS License
Copyright (c) 2002-2014 The ROMS/TOMS Group
This Software is open-source and licensed under the following conditions as stated by MIT/X License (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php ).
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this Software and associated documentation files (the Software), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The most current official versions of this Software and associated tools and documentation are available at:
Participation in the ROMS/TOMS User Forum and access to any available technical support is limited to registered users.
We ask that users make appropriate acknowledgement of The ROMS/TOMS Group, individual developers, participating agencies and institutions, and funding agencies. One way to do this is to cite one or more of the relevant publications listed at:
We describe The ROMS/TOMS Group as follows:
ROMS: Regional Ocean Modeling System
TOMS: Terrain-following Ocean Modeling System
The ROMS/TOMS Group consists of the scientists, engineers, and the members of various academic institutes, government agencies, and the general public that have contributed to the development of the ROMS/TOMS Framework and agree to the terms of the MIT/X license under which ROMS/TOMS is distributed.
Contributions of source code or documentation to the ROMS/TOMS Framework implies that (unless explicitly noted otherwise) the author cedes copyright of that material to the ROMS/TOMS Group and accepts the terms of the license.
Membership in The ROMS/TOMS group is conferred to all who contribute Software to the ROMS/TOMS Framework, and implies acceptance of the copyright and terms of the license.
Recomendations:
We have gone to considerable efforts to make this release flexible in a way that a user tailors the standard source code for a given application, while simultaneously bringing the central code under svn source code management.
The new structure of ROMS allows user specific CPP definitions and analytical options to be set in a small number of separate standalone header files. Therefore, users no longer have to modify small blocks of code in one long file like was neccessary in previous versions of cppdefs.h and analylitical.F. This makes it easy to distribute the configuration for a specific application via a small number of source code related files plus the inputs (grid, forcing netcdf files), while allowing users of the application to keep current with central code improvements via svn. This also takes care of all licensing issues. You are free to include your own statement of your contributions in the files you distribute. The license and copyright statements by the ROMS developer group remain in the source code distributed at www.myroms.org.
There are 3 ways a user can operate:
Method A (preferred): Work with a local source code that is regularly updated with the official version at the www.myroms.org svn repository using svn update. This will allow bug fixes and new code developments to be pushed out to users and minimize the risk of a user unwittingly working with code with known flaws. More exotic adaptations to the code are best maintained by local use of svn, so that possible conflicts with the central svn repository can be reconciled when they arise during the update process. (For example, if you give us feedback regarding a bug, and we fix it in a slightly different way than you did, you don't want that to cause trouble when you update - svn helps with this). Installing and using svn is not a big task and users already have to install perl, netcdf, mpi and their compilers, so it's not a big additional step.
Method B: Users take a tagged release from our repository and hack at it for their own means, but no longer apply updates. Using this method the user risks living with bugs that are subsequently fixed, or having to make ad hoc bug fixes themselves on the basis of notices posted on the forum and/or diffs to individual subroutines. We can name many drawbacks to this approach but acknowledge that some users will go this route, and the MIT License does not prevent them from doing so. The license even technically allows them to pass malformed code along to others though you can be sure it will expose the distributor to quiet vilification among other ROMS users and developers.
Method C (Not good): We would like to strongly discourage groups from distributing the full ROMS source code tailored to user specific applications, even with the intention that the code not be subsequently modified. This will allow bugs to persist and even propagate, and denies users who adopt an application from someone else the opportunity to take full advantage of participation in the ROMS user community.
