Please choose a free license for eigensoft
Hi,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside
Debian with the objective to package free software with relevance in
biology and medicine for official Debian. As you might possibly know we
have created packages also from eigensoft as you can see on our so
called tasks biology page[1].
Since I realised that there is a new version available I wanted to
discuss the licensing issue with you before we are upgrading the
package. The problem is that the current licensing permits a
distribution inside official Debiani. According to the Debian Free
Software Guidelines[2] which are widely accepted as Open Source
definition the current license is not free since it is restricted to
a specific (== non-commercial) use.
I wonder whether you might consider changing the licensing to some free
license like GPL, BSD or MPL - just anything that has no such
restricttion to non-commercial use. You might like to know that several
other authors of biologic software recently switched to free licenses
(may be most prominently phylib). The advantage for you inside Debian
would be a higher visibility of eigensoft (since we distribute it with
metapackages) and a way better quality assurance since Debian is running
several tools to automatically detect problems inside the distributed
software.
Another (unrelated) question is whether there are any publications
connected to eigensoft. As you can see in the entries of other packages
on our tasks page[1] we usually add publications to the scientific
software we are packaging. Just let me know if you want me to add such
a record for eigensoft.
Kind regards and thanks for your cooperation
Andreas.
[1] http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio#eigensoft
[2] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
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http://fam-tille.de
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