A number of issues about GCG on WWW have arisen recently on info-GCG. While
we listen to info-GCG carefully we usually do not respond to info-gcg
directly, however it seems that our position on the provision of GCG
services on WWW needs to be made clear.
HTML INTERFACE TO GCG DOCUMENTATION ON WWW
===========================================
GLOBAL AVAILABILITY
---------------------
Fred Plewniak of IGBMC has produced an html-ized version of our Version 8
Program Manual. He and several other sites have requested to provide this
version globally. While this could reduce our revenue from documentation
sales it is consistent with our mission to make our documentation as widely
and cheaply available as possible to the community that is properly licensed
to use our software. GCG has therefore given permission to each request we
have received so far.
We have asked each server to put a permission statement in the top page so
that our copyright is protected. Legitimately licensed users of our
software may use these servers as a source for our documentation which they
may retrieve and print for their own use.
It is important that the most current version of our documentation be
provided in order to avoid confusion. This requires the provider to
update the documentation whenever a new release becomes available. We hope
to be able to provide html versions of our documentation at some point in
the future so that we can update these servers from here.
In the meantime we will keep in touch with each WWW documentation
server to keep them aware of changes to the Program Manual.
LOCAL AVAILABILITY
-----------------
The GCG License Agreement (section 2B) allows for photocopies of our
documents to be made and distributed within the GCG-licensed site. Serving
the Program Manual by WWW to a legitimately licensed local community seems
consistent with the spirit of this provision and no extra permission is
required from us.
HTML INTERFACE TO THE GCG SOFTWARE
==================================
LOCAL AVAILABILITY
------------------
Any licensed site may provide its legitimately licensed users an html (or
any other) interface to the GCG software.
GLOBAL AVAILABILITY
-------------------
Access to GCG may not be given to users outside of your institute without an
agreement from GCG. (Several institutions currently do provide our software
to large communities, but each of these institutions has asked for permission
from us to do so.)
In general, providing global access to GCG would destroy our current
licensing scheme making it difficult for us to distribute our costs to the
community that uses our software.
THIRD PARTY INTERFACES IN GENERAL
---------------------------------
If you have developed an interface to GCG that does not include files
provided by GCG, you may provide it to others under whatever terms you (or
your employer) feel are appropriate. The people receiving it from you would
need to get the GCG Package from us.
*******************************************************
Maggie Smith and John Devereux 608-231-5200
Genetics Computer Group smith at gcg.comdevereux at gcg.com
*******************************************************
