[3dem] commercial use of RELION

[Sjors Scheres]

Dear EM-ers,

I was asked about this today, so I just thought I'd confirm the below 
explicitly. Please note that I'm not a lawyer, so none of this message 
should be taken as legal advice.

RELION is also free for commercial use.

For now, there is one caveat because of a patent held by Structura 
Biotechnology, the company that makes cryoSPARC. In the hope that it is 
useful for US-based commercial users, I copy a previous message to the 
CCP-EM mailing list with more details below.

Best wishes,
Sjors


--



Dear RELION users,

We are not lawyers, so none of this message should be taken as legal advice.

We have changed the terms of the GPLv2 license under which RELION is 
distributed. Please find the modified part (in section 8) below. 
Academic users or commercial users outside the USA are not affected by 
this change, but if you wish to use RELION in the USA with the SAGD 
method in conjunction with a modulation by a contrast transfer function 
of the particle images for ab-initio single-particle reconstruction, 
non-profit academic research uses are freely licensed under the terms of 
the license agreement available at https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://cryosparc.com/patent-faqs__;!!Mih3wA!SaAVg-T2aKXTkxiqxuavPMEdCFVekCCRWmQQN2F6VGz2TdQezeWWGtZTiqGKmwuHFw$ . 
Alternatively, commercial users in the USA may want to consider 
downloading the latest version from github and rebuilding RELION with 
the cmake option -DALLOW_CTF_IN_SAGD=OFF, which disables the SAGD method 
in conjunction with a modulation by a contrast transfer function of the 
particle images for ab-initio single-particle reconstruction.

Please note that we do not take lightly the disabling of useful 
functionality from RELION. Because we consider that RELION was built 
upon foundations that were laid by many in the field before us, we feel 
strongly that it should remain free to use and further built upon by 
anyone in the field, regardless of their location and whether they are 
involved in commercial activities or not. We believe that the field's 
rapid growth has benefited from its traditions of sharing and openness, 
and hope this will remain the case as the field continues to expand and 
new players continue to join.

Best regards,

Sjors, Erik, Takanori, Jasenko & Dari

--

New text to section 8 of the GPLv2:

This version of RELION uses a stochastic average gradient descent (SAGD) 
method in conjunction with a modulation by a contrast transfer function 
of the particle images for ab-initio single-particle reconstruction.

Should you wish to use RELION with the SAGD method in conjunction with a 
modulation by a contrast transfer function of the particle images for 
ab-initio single-particle reconstruction, please note that this 
functionality may be covered in the USA by US Patent No. 10,282,513. 
Non-profit academic research uses of the patented IP are freely licensed 
under the terms of the license agreement available 
athttps://cryosparc.com/patent-faqs.

Should you wish to use RELION without modulation by a contrast transfer 
function of the particle images in the SAGD method for ab-initio 
single-particle reconstruction, you may disable this functionality using 
-DALLOW_CTF_IN_SAGD=OFF at the stage of configuration, i.e. before 
compilation of the code.

   

-- 
Sjors Scheres
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge Biomedical Campus
Cambridge CB2 0QH, U.K.
tel: +44 (0)1223 267061
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/groups/scheres__;!!Mih3wA!SaAVg-T2aKXTkxiqxuavPMEdCFVekCCRWmQQN2F6VGz2TdQezeWWGtZTiqHiPVSokA$ 

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