Please choose a free license for fasta3 components
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. We are about to create a
debian package from fasta3 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 of some files
such as src/smith_waterman_sse2.c and src/glo[bc]al_sse2.[ch] is not
free since it 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 fasta3
(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#fasta3
[2] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
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