Please consider free license for segemehl
Hello,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside
Debian with the objective to package free software in the field of
medicine and biology for official Debian. We have assembled several
known tools which you can see on our so called biology task page[1].
Also Segemehl will show up on this page in the "Packaging has started
and developers might try the packaging code in VCS" section after about
24 hours.
Since I've got a request from my colleagues to install segemehl I also
intend to package this for Debian. Unfortunately the licensing
information at the website and inside the code is quite sparse. The
only hint I've found is if I call the executables it prints:
SEGEMEHL is free software for non-commercial use
(C) 2008 Bioinformatik Leipzig
>From a Debian point of view this is non-free since it puts a restriction
on the usage of the software. I wonder whether you might consider some
free license like GPL, BSD or similar.
Since I had a look onto the source archive I'd like to give some
additional hints:
1. The archive contains a file
segemehl_0_2_0/segemehl/cscope.out
which most probably is not intended to be distributed.
2. It would be also great if you could strip backup files
(*~) from the source tarball.
3. There is an object file
segemehl_0_2_0/segemehl/libs/remapping.o
which also made it probably unintended into the tarball
Finally it looks unusual that you are distributing all files under
segemehl_0_2_0/segemehl instead of simply putting everything into just
segemehl_0_2_0.
If you are interested I could provide manpages for the three executables
created by the default build process. These will be part of the Debian
package (provided you will consider a free license and we can distribute
the package inside Debian).
As a hint for a naming convention: All three executables are ending
with ".x" which is quite unusual. While it might be help against name
space pollution specifically for such generic names as "lack" you might
consider droping this extension in a next version.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio
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http://fam-tille.de
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