hi Helvi, all,
On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, helvi witek wrote:
Katy Clough kindly agreed to give us an introduction to GRChombo ( http://www.grchombo.org/), their new, publicly available numerical relativity code.
GRChombo is *not* just publicly available; it is free software in the formal sense of "free software" (i.e. free-licensed software - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/free_software), under the BSD 3-clause licence:
https://github.com/GRChombo/GRChombo/blob/master/LICENSE
For a code to be publicly available is not very useful in itself, since that includes non-free codes, for which it is illegal to modify the code, redistribute it, and/or redistribute modified versions.
What is critical for a scientific community like ours is to be able to correct bugs in the code, add features, have other people correct bugs in turn, and freely redistribute corrected versions, while giving proper credit to who did what and including proper revision/history control. For software to be publicly available is insufficient to support this community process; in contrast, being free-licensed software - such as GRChombo - guarantees the right to free development by the community.
Cheers Boud