Fwd: RE: svmlight license question

[Tim Miller <ti...@childrens.harvard.edu>]

Thanks Kevan and Marshall,
I emailed the author of svmlight and he was very clear that our usage is 
acceptable. I think we will consider this matter closed, thank you for 
your advice.
Tim Miller

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	RE: svmlight license question
Date: 	Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:42:32 -0400
From: 	Thorsten Joachims <tj...@cs.cornell.edu>
To: 	Tim Miller <ti...@childrens.harvard.edu>, 
"thorsten@joachims.org" <th...@joachims.org>
CC: 	Thorsten Joachims <tj...@cs.cornell.edu>



Hi Tim,

Using the models trained with my software in the way you describe is fine with me for the application you describe. Feel free to include the trained models in the distribution under any license you like...

Cheers
Thorsten
---
Thorsten Joachims
Professor
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
http://www.joachims.org/

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Miller [mailto:timothy.miller@childrens.harvard.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2013 10:32 AM
To: thorsten@joachims.org
Subject: svmlight license question

Hello Professor Joachims,
We are using svmlight and Alessandro Moschitti's svmlight-tk for some
problems in clinical natural language processing. We are using it for
research purposes per the license.  We would like to also contribute our
best models to Apache cTAKES, an open source clinical text processing
framework. cTAKES does not use svmlight or svmlight-tk binaries or
libraries, but libraries in clearTK which read svmlight models and
implement various kernels. Since svmlight uses a unique license we are
not sure where that leaves us, and the apache legal mailing list
suggested we email the svmlight authors to see if there is an opinion on
this.

As far as I can tell, the concern is this part:

This program is granted free of charge for research and education
purposes. However you must obtain a license from the author to use it
for commercial purposes.

We are using it for research ourselves, but since cTAKES is free and
open source it is possible that it may be used by commercial purposes by
a third party down the road. There is also a possible gray area with
non-profit entities like hospitals which do not fall strictly into
research, education, or commercial.

Sorry for the length, but please let me know what your intention is with
the license or if you have any questions about our usage.
Thanks,

-- 
Tim Miller, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Children's Hospital Informatics Program
Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School
617-919-1223