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Re: [EMBOSS] Files included in EMBOSS but licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs

On 28/07/2011 15:38, Charles Plessy wrote:

Dear EMBOSS developers,
(CC Debian Med mailing list)

while working on upgrading Debian's emboss package to version 6.4.0
(congratulations, by the way), I found some files in EMBOSS that are
not considered ‘Free software’ by Debian.  They were actually present
in past releases as well. Here is their list:

test/data/amir.swiss
test/data/uniprotft.sw
test/swiss/seq.dat
test/swnew/trembl.dat
Huh? Example entries from UniProt? We can of course remove them from the distribution but then the QA tests will not work if anyone tries them.
I suspect amir.swiss predates this UniProt licensing, but the others are more recently updated.
Anyway, EMBOSS will work perfectly well without them. You can just delete them. 


and emboss/data/dbxref.txt
That one can go. It was a source for the DRCAT.dat data resource catalogue and yes we do have permission from UniProt to use it. 


Their license is Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND
3.0), and it disallows modification of the files.  The presence of these files
in EMBOSS makes it impossible for Debian to redistribute it in our operating
system.  I have confirmed with the UniProt consortium's helpdesk that, even in
isolation, these files are covered by the CC BY-ND license.  I see three
possible solutions.

  a) Remove the files in Debian's EMBOSS package.
  b) Distribute EMBOSS with the files, but in the non-free section of the Debian archive.
  c) Replace the files by Free equivalents, for instance by re-creating records from scratch.

I am not very comfortable with any of the solutions, and was wondering if you
would have suggestions ?
I will also have words with the UniProt folk at EBI and if it really is not possible to include a few example entries with EMBOSS then I'll check with the other Open Bio projects. This is really silly. 

regards,

Peter Rice
EMBOSS Team
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