Purpose
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This simulation tool is being made available ‘as is’ to facilitate study of IEEE P802.1D Rapid Reconfiguration and RSTP and advance the standards process. There is no commitment on the part of the authors to further develop this tool, to fix real or perceived defects, or to continue to distribute the tool in the future. This statement should not be taken to represent any disavowal of or reduction in the intellectual property rights of the authors or their employers.

Unsupported Software
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Except as otherwise explicitly and personally communicated, the authors have no time or resource to answer questions about the tool itself, accept bug reports, deal with enquiries as to if there is a new release or further planned development, or respond to any other input on how the program could be improved. You may receive no response to any such communication.
Observations and constructed scenarios to facilitate discussion of the behavior of RSTP, the faithfulness of the tool in reproducing such behavior, and to advance the standards effort consistent with the ‘Purpose’ should be circulated to the P802.1 working group directly.

Permitted Use
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Permission is granted to use the simulation tool for the ‘Purpose’ described above. In using  the tool you agree (a) not to reverse engineer or copy the design of the tool or its methods without the express written consent of its authors (b) that you are aware of the restrictions and possible shortcomings of the tool described in ‘Disclaimer’ below (c) that the ‘Activation Icon’ provided in the tool is retained and displayed in all diagrams created using the tool and subsequently distributed.
 
Disclaimer
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While the authors are interested in advancing standards in general and IEEE P802.1w Rapid Reconfiguration in particular, there can be no guarantee that the Rapid Spanning Tree simulation represents an accurate or permitted interpretation of any revision of P802.1w or the final standard when that is approved. No representation is made as to the fitness of the tool for any particular purpose, including but not limited to the design and performance modeling of networks. The tool is being distributed (see Purpose above) to facilitate study of RSTP by participants in the standards process. It is the responsibility of the users, not the authors, of the tool to verify the correspondence between the behavior represented by the tool and the state machines and other provisions of P802.1w.

Copyright
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Submissions (slides, printed papers, electronic versions of these) to the IEEE standards process are copyright IEEE. The templates, i.e. the initial drawings that you will see when first selecting the Rapid Spanning Tree solution in Visio, are no exception as will be any drawings that you produce and share with the standards group. This copyright may extend to the literal representation of the application as a collection of bytes, allowing the IEEE and participants in the IEEE standards process to make copies as required for study. However these rights do not extend to use, modification, reverse engineering, or reuse of the simulation tool or its internal methods, anymore than they extend to the coding and representational methods used in the postscript, PDF, word, or Zip files used to share text and diagrams. Use of the simulation tool is subject to the conditions described in ‘Permitted Use’ above; with these restrictions the copyright of any diagrams and scenarios that you create using the tool rests with yourself in the first instance.
