Please consider relicensing maxflow 3.0 as free software
Dear Prof. Kolmogorov, dear Prof. Boykov,
I'm writing to you on behalf of the Debian Med team. Debian Med is a
collaborative effort to include all Free Software with relevance to
medicine into the official Debian distribution. Here you can see the
section of our work you might be interested in:
http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/imaging
As you can see we also explicitly mention the publications of the
authors who have written the software in question.
Currently, I'm working on packaging a software for Multivariate Bayesian
Image Segmentation that makes use of your maxflow library.
Initially, the author of this segmentation software tried to make use of
version 2.21 that is redistributable under the terms of the GNU GPL.
However, already for normal sized brain data sets the software crashed,
a problem that does not occur with maxflow version 3.0. Consequently,
the author continued developing with the latter implementation, and to
include the segmentation software into Debian, maxflow-3.0 would also
needed to be included.
Now, to include software into the official Debian distribution it must
follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines [1], which, in its essence,
means the software must be freely redistributable and usable in source
and binary form. Therefore, in order to be able to include maxflow 3.0
in the official Debian distribution, I would kindly like to ask you to
consider relicensing it to one of the Debian approved licenses, for
example by licensing it the same way version 2.21 was licensed.
Many thanks,
Gert Wollny
[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
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