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

[Andreas Tille]

Hi James and Robert,

thanks a lot for your very quick response.  Steffen, you introduced
this package into Debian.  Could you please add some statement?

Am Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 03:55:22PM +0000 schrieb Robert Davies:
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2022, James Bonfield wrote:
> 
> > Hello Andreas,
> > 
> > Rob Davies (CCed) will know more about the caftools origins.
> 
> It uses what was the standard GRL license at the time it was written, which
> included the rather regrettable non-commercial use clause.
> 
> > 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

Ahhhh, apropos acedb.  Good to know that this is on Github now.
Would you mind tagging at least the latest release of it?  Currently
the Debian packaging code is pointing to ftp.sanger.ac.uk which is
not the best choice.

Moreover there is a bug report that acedb is using GTK2[4].  Do
you consider updating acedb to some more recent GUI toolkit?

> > 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.
> 
> It might not be too hard to relicense, as I don't think it had any non-GRL
> contributions.  On the other hand, it's also been obsolete for over ten
> years now, and was written with nothing like modern standards.  Do you know
> how many people are interested in using it?  Unless there's a fairly big
> audience, I'm not sure if we could justify the time needed to bring it up to
> scratch, apart maybe as a very low priority side-project.

I think for the moment replacing all GRL instances by some common free
license would be helpful.  You can also consider adopting the patches we
applied in the Debian package[5] to enable building with modern tools.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

[4] https://bugs.debian.org/967243
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/caftools/-/tree/master/debian/patches

 
> > 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://salsa.debian.org/med-team/caftools/-/blob/master/debian/copyright#L37
> > > 
> > > --
> > > http://fam-tille.de

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