The Princeton Ocean Model (POM) has always been freely available to non-profit users. However, during the last couple of years, there has been quite a few queries concerning the commercial application of POM dealing with an increasing number of environmental problems. This has prompted discussion and study between Princeton University licensing and legal authorities, Alan Blumberg, Jim Herring of Dynalysis of Princeton and me. An attractive idea was that license fees could be used for model development research, enhancement of user friendliness and, possibly, support of model dedicated workshops. After weighing pros and cons, it was finally decided that the model should be free to all users under the terms of the GNU General Public License. If you access the latest version of POM you will find the following affixed to the first page:

Copyright 1996 The Trustees of Princeton University

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is available at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC3
or by writing to The Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place
Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

George Mellor 9/17/99