ASL is a free and open source software distributed by Avtech Scientific under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL) with an optional commercial license.

Open source

The AGPL gives end users the freedom to utilize, study, modify and redistribute the software and a guarantee of continued free use.

There are two main aspects of the AGPL, designed to prevent open source software from being exploited by its inclusion within non-free, closed sourced software products without giving back to the community:

  1. Software that includes or links to source code licensed under the AGPL inherits the AGPL license.
  2. If compiled binaries of software licensed under AGPL are distributed, the source code must also be made available by the distributor. Enabling usage of software over a computer network, typically a web application, is also considered distribution.

Besides that, the license is designed to offer freedom, in particular it does not force users of the software to make modifications or developments publicly available. That means that ASL can be deployed as the basis of in-house, proprietary software without any restrictions. More information on GNU Licenses.

Optional commercial license

The fact that ASL is open source does not imply that it should not be employed in commercial products, which often require the code of the software to remain closed due to trade secrets, patents or other considerations. On the contrary - ASL community and business users can, should and actually do coexist symbiotically benefiting each other. Companies interested in marketing closed source software based on ASL can do so legally by acquiring commercial license from Avtech Scientific and thus make their contribution to the development of ASL. The commercial license is an adopted version of the popular permissive MIT License.

Author attributions

If ASL is used for research that will be published or otherwise publicly distributed, we kindly ask that this fact is mentioned.

The reference to ASL may be in an acknowledgment section, in a phrase such as the following:

"This work benefited from the use of the Advanced Simulation Library™ (ASL),
 an open source hardware accelerated multiphysics simulation platform developed
 by Avtech Scientific and available at <http://asl.org.il>."

To cite ASL in publications please adopt the following:

ASL: Advanced Simulation Library™, an open source hardware accelerated multiphysics simulation platform.1 Version 0.1.5.2 2015-08-01.3 http://asl.org.il.4 Avtech Scientific. Modiin Illit, Israel.

  1. Additionally any sub-routines that were used may be specified. ↩

  2. Version number or commit hash (in the latter case write: Commit 794e49160c089c18a3b455e48bab6ad7c28bb685) ↩

  3. Release or commit date. ↩

  4. The URL should be an active hyperlink wherever technically possible. ↩