Dear all, in at least two of my packages, bioperl and emboss, the test suite contains protein sequence files from the UniProt database, which is distributed under the non-free CC Attribution-NoDerivs license. Through a private discussion I had with their helpdesk, my understanding of their position is that they are trying to enforce the equivalent of a trademark.
Nevertheless, facts such as protein sequences are not copyrightable. This is somewhat confirmed by the UniProt consortium itself on their website (http://www.uniprot.org/help/license), and my conclusion is that, in isolation from the rest of the UniProt database, the records in the test suites of BioPerl and EMBOSS are not copyrightable. I have asked the FTP team on that matter and did not got positive or negative comments, so I think I will like to go ahead and simply dismiss the license of these files, on the grounds that copyright does not apply to them. But given that this is a potentially sensitive issue, I prefer to send a last message to a broader audience before considering the problem solved. The UniProt consortium is non-profit and funded by public money. http://www.uniprot.org/help/about Note that this is not related to my past proposal of keeping non-free files in the source packages when we do not use them. Here I state that these files are free because they are not copyrightable, and moreover they are used at build time, in the regression tests. Actually, this is one of the resaons that I do not want to remove them: if on my machine I test the pacakge with the full test suites, I can not "unlearn" that the UniProt parsers are working correctly, even if I remove the files and break the test suite before upload. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120402140011.gb10...@falafel.plessy.net
