Re: Sponsor for distributed computation daemon: protein folding
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:41:29PM +0100, Daniel Bonniot wrote:
> Thomas Wouters wrote:
> >The software is binary-only ? In that case, it can never become a Debian
> >package itself, at most an installer.
>
> As far as I know there is no source download at the moment. The license
> is: http://www.distributedfolding.org/license.html
>
> Redistribution is explicitely authorized if not-for-profit in the
> license, which makes it not free. Couldn't it be a non-free package?
If nothing else, the lack of source renders it non-free. I haven't
looked at the licence, but if it allows redistribution and doesn't have
too many evil clauses (e.g. doesn't restrict what other software may be
packaged alongside it), then it could go into non-free, yes. But, as
somebody else said, you may have a hard time finding a sponsor.
> I think it would not change much the structure of the package to make it
> an installer. Is it necessary per Debian policy?
No.
> Could it be in main then?
No. An installer, assuming it were itself freely licensed, could be in
contrib. However, in my opinion installer packages are technically
inferior, more fragile, and should be avoided unless absolutely
necessary; you shouldn't use them just to "promote" a package from
non-free to contrib.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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