Hi,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside
Debian with the objective to package free software in life sciences and
medicine for main Debian. I've got a user request to package CARD RGI[1]
Unfortunately the licensing conditions[2] are to restrictive to be
considered free software. On one hand it conflicts for instance with
item 5 and 6 of the Debian Free Software Guidelines since it
discrimitates users intending commercial usage. Even worse the code
is not even distributable inside the Debian non-free repository since
The Materials not be modified and used "as is"
means we can not even apply some patches that would be really needed to
do some sensible distribution to install the code globally on a machine
for every user (as you even suggest in your installation instruction
_docs/README, paragraph Commands for Running RGI system-wide) since this
would mean changing some pathes inside the code. For instance when
starting my unfinished packaging attemt I had created some patches[4]
that are permitted by the above sentence.
It would be great if you might consider some well known free license as
for instance is used by the several tools (prodigal, ncbi-blast+ and
python-biopython) you are basing your code upon. According the
experiences we gathered in the Debian Med team the restrictive license
you are using is not really helping to increase the acceptance of the
code inside the scientific community nor does it encourage others to
provide contributions that would enhance your code.
Kind regards and thanks for considering
Andreas.
[1] https://card.mcmaster.ca/
[2] https://card.mcmaster.ca/about
[3] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
[4] https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-med/card-rgi.git/tree/debian/patches
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