Question about a licensing problem
Dear all,
one of my colleagues, Oscar (in the CC) recently got a software paper
accepted that proposes a "Multivariate Bayesian Image Segmentation Tool"
that can be used for Brain MR segmentation. Our plan is to package this
for Debian, but we have a licensing problem:
The software makes use of the maxflow package
http://vision.csd.uwo.ca/code/
one version, 2.21 is GPL, but already for reasonable sized brain image
data the code crashes, and the way the code is written there is no easy
way to fix this, and hence, Oscar went with version 3.0, which works.
However, version 3.0 comes with a license attached that only allows use
for research purposes and doesn't allow the redistribution of the source
code.
Two questions:
* My first course of action would be to ask the authors of maxflow to
relicense. I remember to have seen a nice example letter one of the
Debian-med pages for doing just that, but right now I can't find it.
Anyone can point me to it?
Considering that the authors changed from a GPL license with 2.21 to a
non-free license, I'm not very optimistic about them willing to change
the license. Which means we have to look for the non-free option.
Given that with the current license not even the source code is
redistributable, how could this be done? Could we add pre-compiled
static libraries of the libraries for supported architectures to the
upload (we would probably restrict this to amd64 and i386)? This would
make the package similar to the AMD and Nvidia drivers that ship binary
blobs that get compiled into the final package.
Many thanks
Gert
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