Re: Is there template for letters about software without licence ?
On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:41:38PM +0100, Christian Holm Christensen wrote :
> Hi Charles,
>
> On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 19:49 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I was wondering wether there was a template for letters in which one
> > signals to upstream developpers that their software have no licence, and
> > explains briefly the differences between GPL, BSD, public domain and no
> > licence.
>
> I do not know of one, though I've probably written about a dozen of
> them :-)
>
> > If not, I will try to write one specific for academic researchers.
>
> Great idea. I know of at least 2 or 3 popular academic software
> packages that could do with such a letter :-)
OK, I will write it this evening. But I am writing one for non-licenced
packages. The case of academic software is more difficult, and maybe it
would help if we had a discussion on this subject on the list (the kind
of slow discussion where one limits himself to one post per day, and
where one takes the time to think about an answer before sending it).
The biggest difficulty I see is that if we want some real-life examples,
then it leads to directly criticize our colleages. For instance, there
is a lack of nice free software for visualising sequence traces. I think
it is because there are enough good ones for which an academic
researcher does not have to pay. Thus we are trained on some
software that we have to buy if we want to use it outside academia.
This sounds like Microsoft-style strategy, but I think that most
researchers do not intend this. Their choices made sense in the past, but
the world is changing. So I would like to find the words to express this
without implying bad things on my older colleagues.
That is why I want to start with unlicenced software for biology. If we
are sucessful to provide debian a custom distribution which fits the
needs of biologists, then we can start to propose people to relicence
some of their works in free software (especially the ones they do not
manage to make money with). But not before having produced
some respectable work by ourselves, I think...
Have a nice day,
--
Charles
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