Services and contact - Elmer

Who develops Elmer

Elmer is developed and maintained mainly at CSC - IT Center for Science (CSC). CSC is a non-profit governmental organization owned by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland. Elmer is mainly used as a collaborative tool in academic research. There are also a number of other developers who have or are contributing to Elmer development.

Obtaining help

For questions concerning the use and capabilities of Elmer, please use the Elmer Discussion Forum. We encourage to use the discussion forums since there the support will benefit also other users. We also have no resources to give private free help for the users - unless they are researchers in Finnish universities or collaborators in some project. 

Joint development

We are happy to see that Elmer is taken to new areas by the user communities. If you're interested in this kind of joint development work we may find common interests and speed up the development. Often the bottle-neck is in case specification, testing and verification which may be done without in-depth knowhow of the code. Joint development may eventually also lead to new project proposals etc.

Contributor Agreement

Even though Elmer is licensed under Open Source its source code is fully owned by CSC. We do not want to compromise this by minor contributions to the source code. Therefore before granting commit access to the version control system of Elmer the contributors are asked to sign an agreement that grants also CSC the rights to the contributed code, pdf. Last time these rights were used in 2012 when ElmerSolver library was transformed from GPL to LGPL license. 

Contracted services

For customers with special needs we provide also contracted support and development. This can be in form of cases which means that a prototype of the customers problem is solved and documented. We can also write tailored solvers that solve the customers non-standard differential equations. This work can be performed under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). We prioritize service work which leads also to the further development of the open source publication of Elmer. 

Non-GPL use of Elmer

Elmer is open source software licensed under GPL (except for the ElmerSolver library which is under LGPL). Therefore you may freely use Elmer for academic, educational and even commercial purposes. However, the GPL license includes a viral effect i.e. all derived work, if distributed, must be distributed under the same license. It is possible that Elmer would also be licensed under other terms if agreed upon.

If you're interested in joint development, contracted services or non-GPL use of Elmer, please contact Peter Råback (at)csc.fi for further discussions.