Hi,
From a legal point of view, a plugin that you have written yourself is not an “improvement…of code copyrighted by the The Regents”.  Basically, what you are not allowed to do is take any code that came with Chimera with copyright notice attached and use it directly as the basis for your plugin.  What you are allowed to do is to look at the Chimera code and see how it performs various functions and write analogous code yourself, or call into the various methods provided by Chimera to do things you need done.  Any code we provide without copyright (e.g. the programming examples) you can use directly.
The purpose of the legalese is to prevent someone from taking Chimera or a substantial subpart and distributing it as their own program.  It is not to stifle people trying to develop plugins like yourself.

—Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


On Aug 19, 2019, at 11:30 AM, mohmed badr <gunman4kill@gmail.com> wrote:

Greeting

The extension that I will try to code will take user taxual inputs and turn them into chimera command line input, replacing the command line to some extande. 
Does this classify as an improvement to the original code (chimera command line) or this is something different and I'm good to go. And thank you again for your time.

Regards 
Mohamed Bade

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019, 6:43 pm Elaine Meng, <meng@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Greetings Mohmed Badr,
Extension writers can redistribute their own code. This is explained in the Licensing page, see:

<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/licensing.html>

There are lots of Chimera extensions available on the web, some of them described in publications, see:

<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/plugins/plugins.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Aug 17, 2019, at 10:39 AM, mohmed badr <gunman4kill@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Greeting
> I want to create new chimera extension, that ease the user interaction with chimera, thus I will need to send the extension to many tester and get their feedback.
> If I understand the license agreement correctly, it stated that I can not distribute any edited version of chimera without your permission, does this include chimera extension too, and if it does please direct me to the person who can give me permission (if it's not you), please note this is my first time to develop chimera extension, if there is any other legal matter I should be aware of please stated as well.
> Regards
> Mohamed Badr

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