Inizio messsaggio inviato: Data: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:28:58 -0500 Da: "Xenophon Papademetris" <xenophon.papademetris@yale.edu> A: "'David Paleino'" <d.paleino@gmail.com> Cc: "'Hirohito Okuda'" <hirohito.okuda@yale.edu> Oggetto: RE: BioImageSuite distribution problems Dear David, Hi, Thanks for your interest in BioImage Suite. >> Hi, >> I'm a Debian maintainer, and am a member of the Debian-Med project. Our project focuses on bringing medical >> >> software to Debian users. >> >> We've come across your software, BioImageSuite. We're still having some packaging issues (i.e. the "private" >> libraries the tarball carries), but there are some "minor" ones we could talk about. >> >>First of all, it's useless asking for a password to download GPLed software. I believe it might be a >>"violation" (it may be a harsh term probably) of the GPL itself (the distribution is not totally "free", but >> > you must register first). 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. 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). Also note that while the code is free, this does not mean that the software name is "free". For example CentOS -- which we use extensively -- repackages RHEL from source code but in Centos they replace all the artwork and references to the word "RedHat", since these are copyrighted. We are happy to make source code available -- it makes life for many students/researchers in the field easier and helps them improve their research productivity. >>Secondly, distributing this software in Debian will "undermine" your policy. In fact, Debian carries all the >>source files in its repositories, thus making your registration-is-needed-policy kinda useless. 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. 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. >>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. Take care, Xenios -- . ''`. 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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