Re: Licensing terms for data derived from ARB/SILVA data

[Sascha Steinbiss <sascha@steinbiss.name>]

Hi all,

>> But we would like to ask you to clearly indicate that the profiles are
>> only free for non-commercial usage, commercial users need a licence.
>> The easiest approach is to add a reference to the SILVA terms of
>> license assigned to the software/profile.
> Argghh! this will prevent from being in free section. And I suppose
> those profiles are mandary for software usage ?

To ensure that the Debian version and the upstream version produce the
same results, yes, they are necessary. I guess there are two choices now:

1. Put barrnap in non-free. What consequences would that have for a
   'regular' academic user -- they would have to enable non-free on a
   default install, right?

2. Use an alternative set of pHMMs in the Debian version of barrnap,
   only including those which are built from Rfam alignments only (Rfam
   has a free license (CC0)). However, that would strongly limit the
   functionality of barrnap as whole rRNA families could end up
   being missing from the output of the dfsg compliant version.

I guess to have a usable barrnap version, 1. is the only viable
solution. Any comments?

Thanks
Sascha