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

[Andreas Tille]

Hello Karen,

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 the file so.obo of the Sequence Ontology.  I failed to find
any licensing information at

   http://www.sequenceontology.org/

So I hope is fine to contact you as your are listed under "drop a note
to".  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 the file so.obo from Sequence 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 Sequence Ontology files can at
least be distributed in our "non-free" area, I would like to know if
Sequence Ontology is available under other terms of use or licenses,
that allow redistributing Sequence 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 Sequence Ontology

       Andreas.

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

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