Il giorno Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:28:58 -0500 "Xenophon Papademetris" <xenophon.papademetris@yale.edu> ha scritto: > This is certainly not a violation of the GPL. You can sell GPL software > (e.g. RedHat Enterprise Linux is GPL), so long as you make the source code > available (which should be made available at reasonable cost -- but not > necessarily free), so asking for a password (and no money!) is hardly a > violation. Sure, I didn't mean a "legal" violation, just moral :) > There is ** no ** requirement in the GPL that the software is free. (See for > example the recent mess with Buffalo Terastation and its source code). Yes, also know that "free software" != "free beer" :) > > ... > > The only reason we ask for a username/password is that it is an easy way to > track downloads so that we can report back to our sponsors (the NIH in this > case) and hence maintain funding for the project. I understand that adding > this in Debian will undermine the policy. I would prefer that you do not add > it -- open source software still costs money/effort and adding this might > hurt the project more than help it .... and lead you back to commercial > only image analysis software. Your choice. Well, Debian users will benefit from your software -- it's your choice whether you want it added or not, you are the author ;) > The software is fairly complex and we have a fairly extensive quality control > (in terms of automated and manual testing) that could not be performed > off-site and might result in "lesser-quality" versions circulating. There are > issues with some compilers etc. For this reason, I would prefer to not see > the software added to Debian. I strongly believe in Debian's quality-control process, but, again, it's your choice :( > > Thirdly, we could not assure that new versions of the software will be > > packaged. This is due to the name given to the tarball: > > > > bioimagesuite_latest_Linux_g++32.tar.gz > > This is simply a symbolic link to the actual tar file which contains a > version number -- dig a little bit deeper on the web page. I'll look into that. Probably, the way to distribute bioimagesuite would be adding a binary-only package in an unofficial repository: Debian policy strictly requires the source code to be available in its repositories. Have a nice day, David P.S.: please remember CCing debian-med@lists.debian.org in your future replies! -- . ''`. Debian maintainer | http://snipurl.com/qa_page/ : :' : Linuxer #334216 | http://www.hanskalabs.net/ `. `'` GPG: 1392B174 | http://www.debianizzati.org/ `- 2BAB C625 4E66 E7B8 450A C3E1 E6AA 9017 1392 B174
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