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

[Chris Mungall]

Note the note at the top of the web page - OBO_REL is deprecated.

The new relation ontology is here:
http://code.google.com/p/obo-relations/

• Code license
• New BSD License
•
• Content license
• Creative Commons 3.0 BY

If you need to distribute the legacy one by all means do it, it should be CC 3.0 BY like most of the OBO ontologies.

On Jan 24, 2013, at 7:06 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> I hope you are fine and got my last mail.  In case you might need some
> time for negotiating these licensing issues it would be really great to
> give us some confirmation that you are working on this.  Any response
> from your side (or somebody else in charge for OBO Relation Ontology)
> will be helpful.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>      Andreas.
> 
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 03:40:20PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>> 
>> 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 OBO Relation Ontology.  I failed to find
>> any licensing or contact information at
>> 
>>   http://obofoundry.org/ro/
>> 
>> but I noticed that you are the maintainer of this page and you might at
>> least be able to forward this request.  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 OBO Relation 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 OBO Relation 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 OBO Relation 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 OBO Relation Ontology
>> 
>>       Andreas.
>> 
>> [1] https://www.ebi.ac.uk/panda/jira/browse/GOHELP-147
>> 
>> -- 
>> http://fam-tille.de
>> 
> 
> -- 
> http://fam-tille.de