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Re: Please consider free license for segemehl



Hi again,

I have not yet received any response since three weeks.  I wonder
whether I was using a proper address.  It would be great if you could
comment on the license issue and I wonder whether the technical hints
I have given were helpful.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 02:21:38PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> 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
> 
> -- 
> http://fam-tille.de
> 
> 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de


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