This is mainly going to be a repeat of things that I have said in many threads. I'm posting this in a sticky thread because so many people have seemed to miss these things and the same questions get asked. No responses in this thread, please, either in support of, or against our position.

Once it became apparent the BOINC platform would stable enough and reliable enough to prevent most of the credit cheating mechanisms that were used in SETI@home classic, SETI@home went open source under the GPL. This change was made both to allow people looking at the source code to help us find bugs, and to allow people to develop optimized version including versions for specific processors. WE OFFICIALLY SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT AND DISTRIBUTION OF OPTIMIZED SETI@HOME APPLICATIONS, provided the license terms of the GPL are followed. We have never requested that an optimized client, distributed under the terms of the GPL, be removed from distribution. In fact, the GPL prohibits us from making such a request.

I was the predominant proponent of using the GPL as opposed to another open source license, primarily because I have in the past, had my code incorporated into proprietary, closed-source products. Use of the GPL prevents that. It also puts some requirements on us, and on anyone else that wishes to distribute SETI@home either in source or binary form. I won't go into the details of the license here. If you are interested, you have a copy in your BOINC/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/ directory named setiathome_5.15_COPYING. There are additional rights granted beyond the standard GPL listed in the file setiathome_5.15_COPYRIGHT. If you have further questions about the GPL or it's enforcement, you can look at the website of the Free Software Foundation or search Groklaw for more info. Please note that UC Berkeley has not transferred copyright to the Free Software Foundation, primarily because UC employs more "Intellectual Property" (a term I despise) lawyers than FSF ever will.

The broad outline is that if you wish to distribute SETI@home in binary format you must make source code available (with any modifications you have made) for a period of no less than 3 years after the date of last distribution. You must also distribute a copy of the GPL, the copyright and disclaimer of warranty and a notice of where the (modified) source code can be obtained. Failure to do so means that you have rejected the terms of the GPL, violated the SETI@home copyrights, and you have violated a contract with the people to whom you have distributed the program. They could potentially sue for any damages caused by the unavailability of the source code (other than those excluded by the disclaimer of warranty). These terms apply even if you are distributing a version given to you by someone else.

Once you have received a copy of a program licensed under the GPL, you have no legal obligation to cease using or to remove the program from your computer, even if the distributor request it. However, if you don't have the source code in machine readable form or guaranteed access to it for the next 3 years, you may not give anyone a copy of the program.

The primary reason I am posting this is that a distributor or optimized versions recently removed his applications from distribution and deleted the source code. This action did not alter any of his obligations under the license. He cannot legally prevent you from using the program. You can choose to comply with his request or not.

Since he distributed the program, he is obligated to (for the next 3 years) still comply with demands for the source code from anyone who downloaded the program from his web site. I doubt any lawyer would agree that those who downloaded it have any actionable claim of damages, so a lawsuit probably isn't going to happen. You should also be aware that unless you have the source code WITH his modification, you cannot distribute these modified version.

Some on the this site has claimed that the GPL places SETI@home into the public domain. It most certainly does not. The University of California holds the copyright to SETI@home and will protect them if necessary. The copyright of any modifications and only those modification belong to people that modify the code. The right to distribute SETI@home (modified or otherwise) is contingent on the distributor following the terms of the GPL. If the distributor refuses to do so, the standard provisions of copyright law still apply. Simply put, that means, follow the GPL or do not distribute.

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