Credit & Ownership

The MOST Development projects are intended to provide meaningful development experience to novice programmers. The fact that they will produce useful applications is an interesting, but complicating, side effect. Participation in any MOST Dev project is on a strictly voluntary basis, and all participants must explicitly agree that the primary purpose of the exercize and of the production of all materials is educational, not for commercial gain. To gain optimum educational benefit for others from the materials produced, The MOST applies its standard policy to materials produced by the project teams, i.e. that the materials so produced are to be placed in the public domain. Instructions for how to accomplish this are in the copyrights section of this web site. The author(s) of each document produced for any project should comply with the instructions there for all materials that they produce for inclusion in the MOST's offerings.

By placing the materials in the public domain, the participants make them freely available for subsequent use by The MOST as example code, but this also means that the materials may be used by anyone anywhere for inclusion in commercial applications without credit or recompense to the original authors. Participants are as free as anyone to use the materials they produce or any other materials they find on the site in commercial endeavors, but should realize that they effectively surrender *exclusive* commercial rights to the materials they produce as part of the project team by placing them in the public domain. We consider that an acceptable side effect of what works best for The MOST's objectives.

The MOST will help distribute a final copy (including all pertinent documentation and supporting files) of all applications produced by MOST Development Project teams in addition to keeping the development documents and example code on line. Copies of the application will be posted in the FTP section of the Resources section and distributed via any available free distribution method. In general, we will try to focus on creating useful Mac OS based applications and - having produced them - we will try to ensure that they are subsequently *used*.

All applications produced by our project teams will be distributed as freeware. Project Team members are required to agree that no shareware fee will be attached to any applications produced by the team. Frankly, we don't want The MOST associated with any commercial activity. Participants should be willing to consider the learning experience and explicit credit (see below) that they receive from participation as sufficient recompense for the effort they expend. This does not stop a project team (or an individual on the team... or a total stranger for that matter) from REcompiling another version of the program and attempting to distribute it as shareware. The source code to do so will be available on the site. However, unless some additional value were added by augmenting the program, there would be little reason for anyone to pay anyone a shareware fee for something that we will ensure is readily available as freeware. If, after a project is relased as MOST freeware, one of the origional authors does create an augmented version of that application beyond the level that we distribute as freeware, The MOST will gladly allow a pointer to how to obtain the enhanced version to be included with the freeware version that we distribute.

The MOST has a strong internal policy to ensure that everyone is properly credited for their contributions to The MOST's materials. This carries over to wanting to ensure that everyone who contributes to an actual programming project will be explicitly recognized for their contribution. All members of the project team who actively participate (in the judgement of the project manager) will be explicitly recognized by name in the project documentation and in the "About Box" (or equivalent) of the application. Participants who wish to do so may also include personal contact information and a brief "statement" of their choosing. We assume good judgement will be exercized in the selection of the statement. Those who are shy may limit their credit to the inclusion of their name in the above-stated two locations.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998. Last Update to This Page: 1998/05/04
This Page Maintained by: radar pangaean * * * Original Author: radar pangaean
The MOST web site is built and maintained by the voluntary efforts/donations of our members.