Re: Please choose a free license for gmap
Dear Thomas,
Taking into account the major rewrite of GMAP and GSNAP, I wonder if you
could consider the license change as well?
Thank you,
Alex, on behalf of Debian-Med.
On 09/05/2017 10:51 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
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