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

[Andreas Tille]

Hello Michelle,

I'm writing you on the behalf of the Debian Med team which has included
the EMBOSS suite into official Debian distribution.  The EMBOSS suite
does contain some files of the Evidence codes ontology and the site

   http://www.obofoundry.org/cgi-bin/detail.cgi?id=evidence_code

lists you as contact.  So I hope is fine to contact you.  Please note
that I have put the according bug tracker e-mail to this mail which
makes this mail publicly available.  While we would finally need a
public statement please make sure you drop this CC in case you prefer
that your response is not publicly readable.

By packaging the EMBOSS suite the Debian operating system is currently
redistributing some files from Evidence codes ontology indirectly, which
incorporates some Evidence codes ontology files since its version 6.4
(http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/emboss).

Debian considers copyrights and licenses very seriously, and our system
only contains Free software, that is, materials that our users can
freely use, modify and redistribute themselves. In addition to our
system, we have a "non-free" archive in which, as a convenience for our
users, we redistribute works that give less freedoms to our users.

In order to evaluate if works containing Evidence codes ontology files
can at least be distributed in our "non-free" area, I would like to know
if Evidence codes ontology is available under other terms of use or
licenses, that allow redistributing Evidence codes ontology files.  You
might even like to follow the Gene Ontology Consortium that has put its
database under a Creative Commons BY (Attribution 3.0 Unported)
license[1].

Kind regards and thanks for providing Evidence codes

       Andreas.

[1] https://www.ebi.ac.uk/panda/jira/browse/GOHELP-147

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