Re: Please consider a free license for CARD RGI
Hi,
I have not yet received any answer according to the license of CARD.
I can confirm that I technically solved the packaging of CARD for Debian
but I can not move it to the public Debian mirror due to the non-free
license.
Kind regards
Andreas.
On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 02:43:32PM +0200, Andreas Tille 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 in life sciences and
> medicine for main Debian. I've got a user request to package CARD RGI[1]
>
> Unfortunately the licensing conditions[2] are to restrictive to be
> considered free software. On one hand it conflicts for instance with
> item 5 and 6 of the Debian Free Software Guidelines since it
> discrimitates users intending commercial usage. Even worse the code
> is not even distributable inside the Debian non-free repository since
>
> The Materials not be modified and used "as is"
>
> means we can not even apply some patches that would be really needed to
> do some sensible distribution to install the code globally on a machine
> for every user (as you even suggest in your installation instruction
> _docs/README, paragraph Commands for Running RGI system-wide) since this
> would mean changing some pathes inside the code. For instance when
> starting my unfinished packaging attemt I had created some patches[4]
> that are permitted by the above sentence.
>
> It would be great if you might consider some well known free license as
> for instance is used by the several tools (prodigal, ncbi-blast+ and
> python-biopython) you are basing your code upon. According the
> experiences we gathered in the Debian Med team the restrictive license
> you are using is not really helping to increase the acceptance of the
> code inside the scientific community nor does it encourage others to
> provide contributions that would enhance your code.
>
> Kind regards and thanks for considering
>
> Andreas.
>
>
> [1] https://card.mcmaster.ca/
> [2] https://card.mcmaster.ca/about
> [3] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
> [4] https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-med/card-rgi.git/tree/debian/patches
>
> --
> http://fam-tille.de
--
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