# History and Licence

## History of the Interactive Phase Retrieval Suite

The Interactive Phase Retrieval Suite was first conceived in 2011 by Marcus Newton with the major design goal of providing a complete set of tools for phase reconstruction and visualisation. It was intended as the successor to previous command line only tools which were widely in use at the time. It aimed to be encompassing and placed emphasis on maintaining reproducibility on various platforms. It achieved this largely by providing the means to easily share encapsulated data analysis parameters.

The name Bonsu means `whale` or large marine mammals of the Cetacea group, in the Akan language of western African. This was chosen as a sentiment to the “eye-like” focus of the sound beam that certain cetacean mammals emit during sonar echo location.

## Licence

All releases of the Interactive Phase Retrieval Suite are Open Source (see http://www.opensource.org/ for the Open Source Definition). Bonsu, the Interactive Phase Retrieval Suite, is distributed under the GNU General Public License. A copy of the GNU General Public Licence is provided with the program. Also see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.