Dear Andreas,
The Henikoffs and I received your email about regarding changing the
license of blimps and SIFT to GPL. We are willing to consider it if SIFT
can be easily distributed. Do you have a working version of SIFT on
debian?
My old version of SIFT uses a very old version of blast and calls a binary
of blimps --I think the source code has been since lost.
If you can can confirm that SIFT works in debian, then Dr. Henikoff will
talk to the FHCRC tech transfer office to start the process.
Thanks,
Pauline
Hello,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside
Debian with the objective to make Debian the best distribution for biology
and medical care. We try to package free software that is relevant in
these fields for main Debian.
You might know that there are packages of blimps and sift for some time
which are not part of the official Debian distribution due to its license
which is considered non-free since it violates the Debian Free Software
Guidelines[1]. We would really make blimps and sift part of the official
Debian distribution which has several advantages for users as well even for
you as developers since the wider spreading of your code might lead to
enhancements that will be send to you.
We would like you to reconsider the restriction under the following
considerations:
- Did you earned a mentionable amount of money by selling mssstest
yourself?
- Do you consider that anybody else would earn a mentionable amount
of money by selling a freely licensed program?
- Would you agree that it is in the interest of mssstest code and
the users to have a free distribution inside Debian?
Please keep in mind that the restriction implies that the programs cannot
be included as part of a distribution that is sold (even if it's just to
compensate for the cost of the storage media). Your intention is almost
certainly to prevent people to sell the program standalone.
To our experience authors who used this kind of license (for instance Joe
Felsenstein as author of PHYLIP) did not considered this as a success. May
be you reconsider the license to choose some free license like GPL; BSD or
MPL - feel free to discuss this here on our mailing list.
It would be great if you would simply drop the restriction and enable us to
integrate blimps and sift into Debian properly.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
--
http://fam-tille.de
