Starlab Policies

The primary authors of Starlab are Piet Hut, Steve McMillan, Jun
Makino, and Simon Portegies Zwart. We encourage users of Starlab to
add their programs and libraries to the package. It is our hope that
subsequent releases will contain substantial amounts of user-written
material. They can send their code to Piet or Steve, after they have
carefully checked that it is working and is compatible with the latest
Starlab version.

The prospect of having several people share (and possibly augment) a
software package leads to the thorny question of ownership of
software, and, more concretely, authorship of papers written using
that software. We want the distribution to be as free as possible, but
we must recognize that Starlab represents a substantial investment of
programming time and effort on the part of the contributors.

We do not wish to establish hard-and-fast rules. Our only guideline is
that, if Starlab is used in a project and is found useful, then we ask
that both the package and the authors of the programs used should be
acknowledged at the end of any resultant papers. Contributors must
recognise that, in adding a program to Starlab, they surrender any
legal (if not moral) right to control its future use, as well as any
claim to co-authorship in publications resulting from it.
