Re: [Help] Please compile clustalw on architectures ia64, mips, mipsel, s390 and m68k
Le Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 02:30:59PM +0200, Frank Küster a écrit :
> Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
>
> > What about convincing the upstream developers to change the license to
> > one of the free software licenses? It would solve the problem for
> > good.
>
> Judging from the mail recorded in its copyright file, this isn't likely
> to happen.
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/c/clustalw/clustalw_1.83-1.1/clustalw.copyright
Dear all,
Eight years have passed since the authors of Clustal gave a special
permission to Debian. There could be hope that the non-exclusive
licences they sold to companies have expired, removing the reason for
which they are reluctant to give Clustal away for free. Indeed, as there
are now some "competitors" in the public domain, I see more and more
commercial products using them instead of Clustal, so it is predictable
that the authors will not get revenues from this program for ever, if
they still do.
When the Debian-Med project will have some authority in the field of
molecular biology and bioinformatics, I think that it will be a good
idea to contact the academic authors of non-free software, and ask them
if they would like to reconsider their choice. But for this, we need
success, and for success we need to listen to our users, and our users
still massively use Clustal compared to the free competitors.
http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=kalign+dialign+probcons+clustalx+clustalw+muscle+t-coffee+poa+amap-align+sigma-align&show_installed=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1
I do not know how to interpret the popcon data: either some users are
swiching from the clustal programs to alternatives, or we are losing
some users since clustalw was removed from testing. Already 10 % less...
Ouch, it bleeds...
In conclusion: by building this non-free package and allowing clustalw
to migrate in testing, you will help to increase our user base and
promote all the free software we promote together with clustalw:
http://wiki.debian.org/SequenceAlignment
PS: depending on the answer, debian-science can be a better list than
debian-devel.
PPS: I would bet that half of the architectures on which clustalw is
missing are architectures on which nobody uses Clustal W or Clustal X,
but this is another story...
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian-Med Packaging Team
Wako, Saitama, Japan
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