Re: How much interest in a "debian-science.org" repository?
Le Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 12:03:42AM +0200, Thomas Walter a écrit :
>
> Often applications have
> exceptions for non-commercial use or usage for research tasks. The
> latter is easily proven when working for an institute or university.
> As a conclusion, separating science applications into
> main/contrib/non-free does not make much sense in these cases.
Dear all,
actually, what drives the "no profit please" attitude is the increasing
pressure for the academic centers to make money from their researchs.
But this leads to a paradox: If we are to submit patents on our
discoveries, can we still say that our works are not for profit, because
we do not perform them within a company which has to pay its
shareholders?
I have seen some academic software taking some free code (BSD style) and
releasing their derivatives under a "contact our IP service if you want
to make profit" licence. Of course, this is their right, and it can even
make sense, for instance if the derived work is the fruit of a
collaboration with a for-profit entity. But in many case, it just looks
like that it is the default attitude, and I will do my best to avoid
behaviors supporting this.
There comes the link with the original subject of this thread: while
I'll be happy to upload my DFSG-free packages to a science repository
when it makes sense, I am a bit affraid that your initiative could end
up in a packaging effort of non-free software, which would be
detrimental to free software, as well as commercial software when it is
not sold by adademia.
In molecular biology, there are de facto standards which are given away
for free to the persons who learn their jobs, and sold at an expensive
price when used "for profit", whatever "for profit" still mean
nowardays. No, I am not talking of MS Office, Acrobat Reader or Adobe
Photoshop, I am talking of softwares for molecular biology which have no
competitors because the "no profit" attitude is in facts similar to the
"kill our competitors by giving our product for free" attitude which
makes IE, WinMediaPlayer,... so strong.
In conclusion, I think that obviously the reason for your initiative is
that there are not enough DDs in science, and that this is a true
bottleneck for packaging efforts. So the challenge is to do something
which does not reinvent the wheel (snapshots, mentors, keyring, ...),
but does not encourage to relax debian standards on the other hand. What
I like the much in the ideas developped in this thread is the
multi-distro backport, because we researchers are very busy and not
interested in OS upgrades at work.
But in the long term, what we need is more DDs, more DDs and more DDs.
Six months of packaging experience is required for starting the new
maintainer process, so people interested should start their first
package as soon as possible. If you like biology, I have listed
programs, their licences, and the feasibility of their packaging in
pages such as this one:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSequenceAnalysis
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Wako, Saitama, Japan
NM application on hold until october 2006
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