Re: Please choose a free license for gmap
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your note. It's something I will consider. In fact, our
previous department head, Robert Gentleman, was the author of the R
statistical package, and thought we should do this. However, he left
our company some time ago, and we are still looking for a department
head.
I would also have to consult with our legal department, since the
software was built using company resources and on company time.
Regards,
Tom
--
Thomas D. Wu, M.D., Ph.D.
Principal Scientist, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
Genentech, Inc., 1 DNA Way, South San Francisco, CA 94080
Phone: 650-225-5672, Fax: 650-225-5389
E-mail: twu@gene.com
On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 04:25:50PM +0200, Alex Mestiashvili wrote:
> 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 gmap as you can see on our so
> called tasks biology page[1].
>
> According to the Debian Free Software Guidelines[2] which are widely
> accepted as Open Source definition the current license is not free since
> it forbids the use and distribution of modified copy under some
> conditions and also forbids free use of the software in commercial products.
>
> I wonder whether you might consider changing the licensing to some free
> license like GPL, BSD or MPL - just anything that has no such
> restriction to non-commercial use and use of modified code. 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 gmap
> (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.
>
>
> Kind regards and thanks for your cooperation
>
> Alex
>
> [1] http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio#gmap
> [2] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
>
End of quote
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