Please use a free license for paml
Hi Ziheng Yang
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 paml 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] since it restricts the free usage to academit use only.
We would really make paml 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 program
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 paml into Debian properly.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
--
http://fam-tille.de
Reply to: