[Debian-med-packaging] Any idea how to ask about a free license for caftools? [EXT]

[James Bonfield]

Hello Andreas,

Rob Davies (CCed) will know more about the caftools origins.

Anything which is owned by GRL we can relicense under something less
prohibitive.  Some of it builds on top of AceDB though, which is
copyright MRC-LMB (Richard Durbin) and CRBM du CNRS (Jean Thierry-
Mieg).

AceDB ended up being relicensed under GPL:

    https://github.com/richarddurbin/acedb

So it's possible we may simply be able to replace those ancient bits
of acedb in caftools with the equivalent functions culled out of the
latest source tree and solve that licensing dilemma.  However it's a
bit of work to do so may take a little time.

I see other bits are taken from the Staden Package and are also
copyright MRC.  These eventually ended up being reissued as a BSD
license.  So I'm sure they're similarly solveable, if a problem.

Regards,

James

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 02:02:40PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> I'm contacting you since I hope you might provide some connection to
> some person at Sanger who might be able to clarify the license of caf[1]
> which points to version 2.0.2 from 2011.  However, the ftpdirectory[2]
> contains version 2.0.3 (from 2020).
> 
> We can not ship that code in Debian due to its license which is
> restricted to non-commercial purposes[3] which is considered non-free
> due to its restriction.
> 
> It would be great if you could find some responsible person who could
> change the license to something DFSG free (as most of the code from
> Sanger we have packaged).
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>       Andreas.
> 
> [1] https://www.sanger.ac.uk/tool/caf/
> [2] ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/resources/software/caf/
> [3] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__salsa.debian.org_med-2Dteam_caftools_-2D_blob_master_debian_copyright-23L37&d=DwIBAg&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=wodoR_G062E4YLZ-xu5t6hJzZnUh1BARylpXLDB6VWA&m=SdYyaYN3B2GjqzeaFpmHEinVRLHgL5ZdaGoO4OMbmbUBvtX_989QgOl7Tkfp2LNm&s=gTg9mEL713J8Vgk4PhIgnPJo5t68Mxa-Jqkvz0e3rJA&e= 
> 
> -- 
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__fam-2Dtille.de&d=DwIBAg&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=wodoR_G062E4YLZ-xu5t6hJzZnUh1BARylpXLDB6VWA&m=SdYyaYN3B2GjqzeaFpmHEinVRLHgL5ZdaGoO4OMbmbUBvtX_989QgOl7Tkfp2LNm&s=jHKL2rZtC4BWns2dsFSesO_ig70W86PY-sqziWLQkkY&e= 

-- 
James Bonfield (jkb at sanger.ac.uk)
The Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambs, CB10 1SA


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