Subject: Re: CCL:ZINDO program-Summary

From: val <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:35:45 +0300

Dear CCL'ers,

From the summary it is clear that there is no shareware or freeware
ZINDO program available. 

I have some questions that are not directly related to the summary,
however, it would be interesting to know what other CCL members 
think on these and what the answers may be.

1. Some points in the recent discussion confused me a little:

 ...
> ZINDO is only available from MSI
 ...
> ZINDO belongs to MSI
 ...
> PM3tm is only found in Spartan.
 ...

It sounds like The Methods are copyrighted and protected being
used elsewhere.
Unlikely possible a program (or a method) could become popular 
without any papers published in the literature and describing them
in details. On the other hand, if the method and parametrization 
are known it means, in principle, anybody can write the program
based on this information.

Is it possible to publish something in the Open Literature and
copyright it so, that incorporating the data into another programs
will be forbidden ?

2. Reading the articles published some time ago (i.e. 7-15 years
ago or so) one often finds the sentence like this: "...the program
is available from authors upon request".
On more recent publications this is  rare case and, sometimes,
even if it is - really it doesn't.

Next, there are a lot of attempts to port programs, make GUI, 
create huge software packages from existing code (modern commercial
products), etc.
Does it mean that computational chemistry is over-saturated with
different method/programs and nowadays the application rather than
development is the main goal of theoretical chemists?

3. The Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange (QCPE) has been mentioned
(only ones) in the discussion. It seems, however, this type of  
software distribution is not very popular now (correct me if I am 
wrong).

Has QCPE influenced the progress of computational chemistry earlier?
If so, what trends made this way of code development less effective
now?

any suggestions and discussion are welcome.

         best regards,
              Valentin.

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