[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#694908: Redistribution of Pathway ontology inside EMBOSS suite packaged for Debian

[Charles Plessy]

Dear Victoria,

I am Charles Plessy from the Debian project, working with Andreas Tille on
packaging and distributing software relevant to medecine and bioinformatics.

Thank you for your answers about Pathway Ontology (PW) and sorry to bother you
again.  It would tremendously help us if we could have a confirmation that PW
is released under the Creative Commons license 3.0, because in our experience,
there are often misundersandings about what is meant by "free".  In particular,
in Debian's point of view, it is necessary to allow a work to be sold in order
to be called "free".  One of the reasons is that Debian is often distributed on
DVDs that are sold, and that requires the right to commercially use each of the
~30,000 programs that we redistribute.

The CC 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) would give us
that right.  Given that it already been adopted for other ontologies, in
particular Gene Ontology, I hope that it would be possible for RGD to release
PW under this license or a similarly free one.  In that case, could you for instance
drop a LICENSE file in ftp://rgd.mcw.edu/pub/data_release/ontology_obo_files/pathway/ or
answer us at 694908 at bugs.debian.org (where I have sent a carbon copy of this message).

Many thanks for the time you are giving us,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan