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.