Dear Pauline,
On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 09:59:14AM +0800, Pauline Ng wrote:
> The Henikoffs and I received your email about regarding changing the
> license of blimps and SIFT to GPL. We are willing to consider it if SIFT
> can be easily distributed. Do you have a working version of SIFT on
> debian?
Currently version 4.0.3b is packaged and I know that this is not the
latest released version. One reason for this lag behind is the fact
that SIFT remains in non-free which does not receive the apropriate care
- thus the motivation for my mail to tackle the latest version if there
would be a free license.
> My old version of SIFT uses a very old version of blast and calls a binary
> of blimps --I think the source code has been since lost.
The Debian version of SIFT is linked against a separately packaged
version of blimps 3.9. I noticed that the downloadable tarball
sift5.2.2.tar.gz contains a dir blimps/blimps with C sources (and even
*.o files which should not be distributed inside a tarball). I also see
a dir blimps/bin which we would clean up from the tarball since we
usually do not ship precompiled binaries in the source tarball.
> If you can can confirm that SIFT works in debian, then Dr. Henikoff will
> talk to the FHCRC tech transfer office to start the process.
I can confirm that the Debian Med team got the old version of SIFT
working and we will try or best to get also the latest version working.
However, please make sure that the license change is not only for the
purpose of distribution inside Debian but rather in general since a
specific free Debian license is also considered as non-free by the
Debian Free Software Guidelines.
> Thanks,
> Pauline
Thanks a lot for your fast response
Andreas.
> Hello,
>
>
>
> I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside
> Debian with the objective to make Debian the best distribution for biology
> and medical care. We try to package free software that is relevant in
> these fields for main Debian.
>
>
>
> You might know that there are packages of blimps and sift for some time
> which are not part of the official Debian distribution due to its license
> which is considered non-free since it violates the Debian Free Software
> Guidelines[1]. We would really make blimps and sift part of the official
> Debian distribution which has several advantages for users as well even for
> you as developers since the wider spreading of your code might lead to
> enhancements that will be send to you.
>
>
>
> We would like you to reconsider the restriction under the following
>
> considerations:
>
>
>
> - Did you earned a mentionable amount of money by selling mssstest
>
> yourself?
>
> - Do you consider that anybody else would earn a mentionable amount
>
> of money by selling a freely licensed program?
>
> - Would you agree that it is in the interest of mssstest code and
>
> the users to have a free distribution inside Debian?
>
>
>
> Please keep in mind that the restriction implies that the programs cannot
> be included as part of a distribution that is sold (even if it's just to
> compensate for the cost of the storage media). Your intention is almost
> certainly to prevent people to sell the program standalone.
>
>
>
> To our experience authors who used this kind of license (for instance Joe
> Felsenstein as author of PHYLIP) did not considered this as a success. May
> be you reconsider the license to choose some free license like GPL; BSD or
> MPL - feel free to discuss this here on our mailing list.
>
>
>
> It would be great if you would simply drop the restriction and enable us to
> integrate blimps and sift into Debian properly.
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
>
> Andreas.
>
>
>
>
>
> [1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
>
>
>
> --
> http://fam-tille.de
--
http://fam-tille.de