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

[Andreas Tille]

Hello Victoria,

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 Pathway ontology and the site

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

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 Pathway ontology indirectly, because
EMBOSS has included these since 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 Pathway ontology files can at
least be distributed in our "non-free" area, I would like to know if
Pathway 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 Pathway ontology

       Andreas.

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

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