[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#807580: More licensing issues (Was: BLAT license)

Andreas Tille andreas at an3as.eu
Thu Dec 10 21:28:15 UTC 2015


Hi Jim,

its a long time ago and I have not heard from you back then when we were
discussing the license of BLAT.

As you can read in the bug log of the Debian package of the BioConductor
component rtracklayer here

   https://bugs.debian.org/807580

this code is based upon code obtained from

   http://genome-source.cse.ucsc.edu/gitweb/?p=kent.git

and thus covered by your license that is not compatible with DFSG
guidelines.  It would be really great if we could refresh the past
discussion to find a free license for this code.  The alternative would
be that we need to kick a chain of about 10 dependencies of BioConductor
packages out of Debian.

'm not sure whether I mentioned it before but we had a long standing
discussion with Joe Felsenstein about PHYLIP and finally he confirmed
that the gain he had over *years* was so small that the loss to get
better distribution, cooperation and patches might outweight this by
far.  I wonder whether you might be interested in this kind of
experiences - at least Joe has decided in 2014 for a BSD-2-clause
license.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 04:22:12PM -0700, Jim Kent wrote:
> Hmm.  The reason I'm comfortable having you redistribute it is that I know
> you will put it in a section where it is clearly marked as license
> required.
> 
> The tricky part is where re-redistribution comes in.
> 
> Perhaps in your files is a license that has a word or two on this subject
> already?  If not then I must pause and think, and discuss with my people as
> well.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 2:15 PM, Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Jim,
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 01:57:39PM -0700, Jim Kent wrote:
> > > It is a short license.  It does not forbid modification, and we got no
> > > problem with that.  We do want to _check_ on redistribution to make sure
> > > that it is clear we reserve commercial licensing rights.
> > >
> > > Hopefully this clears things up, but if not let me know, and we can add a
> > > few more words to the license if you like.
> >
> > I think this is the problematic part:  How do you practically want to
> > check the redistribution via Debian?  Even if the non-free section is
> > not official Debian the package would available from the Debian mirrors
> > and from several potential derivatives.  Surely it is no dedicated
> > distribution of BLAT but the license is not totally clear whether we are
> > allowed to do what we intend to do (distributing BLAT in source and
> > binary form) even if it is the users obligation to read the license text
> > and check whether he is allowed to use the program.
> >
> > Kind regards
> >
> >       Andreas.
> >
> > > On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi Jim,
> > > >
> > > > could you please give some clarification about the BLAT license.  Our
> > > > ftpmaster interprets it as not distributable.  We are aware that it
> > > > needs to go into the non-free section but it would be a shame if it
> > > > could not even go there.
> > > >
> > > > Kind regards
> > > >
> > > >       Andreas.
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 08:01:50PM +0100, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:
> > > > > Hi,
> > > > >
> > > > > the license of BLAT is a bit strange. It just allows the use of the
> > > > > software but no modification and no distribution. Did I miss
> > > > > anything?
> > > > >
> > > > >   Thorsten
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > http://fam-tille.de
> > > >
> >
> > --
> > http://fam-tille.de
> >

> _______________________________________________
> Debian-med-packaging mailing list
> Debian-med-packaging at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-med-packaging


-- 
http://fam-tille.de



More information about the Debian-med-packaging mailing list