Ownership and Authorship

The primary author of nbody 1.1 is Jun Makino.  Some of the basic code
are recycled from STARLAB (as noted in the header of respective
files). I encourage users of nbody to modify/improve it.  They can
send their code to Jun Makino, after they have carefully checked that
it is working. I will then try to see if the new code can be
integrated to the old version, or can live as separate piece of
program, and if either is possible, integrate it to the next
distribution package.

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.  I want the distribution to be as free as possible, but
nbody represents a substantial investment of programming time and
effort on the part of the contributors.  For that reason, while I do
not wish to establish hard-and-fast rules, I feel that some guidelines
for the use of the package may be helpful.

If nbody is used in a project and is found useful, then both the
package and the authors of the programs used should simply be
acknowledged at the end of any resultant papers.  A similar
acknowledgment in the later papers of a long series would also be
appropriate. In addition, the authors should be informed of the
resultant papers.

I decided not to ask for the coauthorship, since, practically
speaking, to be one of the authors of a paper of which content I'm not 
familiar with is impractical and painful.