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

Jim Kent kent at soe.ucsc.edu
Fri Dec 11 07:15:20 UTC 2015


Hi Andreas, I thought I'd left the ball in your court....


On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:

> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/attachments/20151211/a61f8c09/attachment-0003.html>


More information about the Debian-med-packaging mailing list