Subject: merging & black boxes

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 19:14:12 -0700

and let's hope, that AMBER will be still around before it becomes 
	a black box.
	
	Michael Kotelyanskii PhD

To allay any such fears: we have no intention of making AMBER a black box - 
one of its major strengths has been that source code is provided, and this has 
helped attract excellent feedback and collaborations from the user community,
as well as drawing requests from hardware vendors to include it in the SPEC 
benchmarks (it is now at the 'candidate' level and we don't know if it will
actually be included).

When we drew up an agreement with Oxford Molecular to allow them to also
distribute AMBER, one of the first stipulations was that they would provide 
source in addition to their executables. Incidentally, we don't provide 
executables ourselves (although we can ship the OM CD), but AMBER includes 
a very portable compilation scheme for FORTRAN - the user just chooses a 
machine compatibilty file - which we have put in the public domain. See 
http://www.amber.ucsf.edu/amber/amber.html.

Bill Ross
Kollman lab
University of California, San Francisco