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Can a UMAT be reseased as Open Source (GPL) ?
Thu, 2009-11-05 04:23 - Louis P. Gauthier
(Question tranfered from previous blog post)
Dear iMechanica members,
Can ABAQUS or other commercial software's user material be reseased as open source code? GPL for example? If so, whith the multiple licenses proposed, which one would be most
suited for releasing vumat source code. The intent is simply to make
this vumat available to as many people as possible without anyone
taking undue ownership of the material law. Also, would there be any concerns about publications or articles concerning said material law once the source code is public?
Thanks for your help
Louis P. Gauthier
Forums:
Of course
As the copyright-holder of a piece of software (such as a (V)UMAT routine), you can release it under whatever license you wish. I have seen UMATs licensed under BSDlike licenses several times.
The GPL in particular is a large and complicated license and I am not sure how its requirements involving linking factor into distributing a UMAT, but I can't imagine it would cause any complications (unless Simulia decided to distribute your code with Abaqus for some reason, perhaps). All-in-all, a simpler permissive license is more typical for a piece of software as small as a normal UMAT.
Licensing your code involves the copyright for the actual code you wrote, not the material law it implements. I cannot imagine any legal implications having to do with publications after the source code is released--the copyright of an article you write is completely separate from the copyright of source code you write and happen to be describing in the article.
Standard disclaimer applies: I am not a lawyer.