Re: Please choose a free license for gmap
Hi Thomas,
thanks for you fast and positive response. Feel free to contact our
mailing list in case you might face problems. We have some experience
in licensing questions.
Kind regards
Andreas.
On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 10:01:40AM -0700, Thomas Wu wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
--
http://fam-tille.de
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