AnIML Tools

The AnIML workshop at Pittcon went well this year.  My talk this year, Open Source Licensing of AnIML, gave a brief overview of open source licensing options and how the AnIML standard will be licensed.  The slides for the talk are available for download .

This was an interesting talk to prepare as I did not know the licensing scheme that ASTM uses for its standards.  I discovered that the ASTM licensing of AnIML will not be an open source license but a very traditional copyright licence.  The good news is that the AnIML schema documents themselves (core and technique schemas) will be freely distributed by ASTM.

The main take home message from this talk was that AnIML is a standard does not place restrictions on implementation.  Without licensing or royalty payments it is possible to develop AnIML aware software under any license (open source or commercial).

One nice surprise that came from this workshop, due to the recent code donation from Mark Bean (GSK), was the AnIML tools viewer Colobus was shown.  The viewer was run along side the Seahoarse viewer from Burkhard Shaefer from BSSN Software.  Burkhard's viewer was more polished but it was nice to see that both viewers could easily display the several files that were thrown at them.

The AnIML standard is coming along well.  I can see this standard sent off for balloting before the end of the year.