[Debichem-devel] NIST CODATA license (was: qcelemental_0.5.0-1_amd64.changes REJECTED)

[Michael Banck]

Dear Prof. Mohr,

I tried to upload qcelemental https://github.com/MolSSI/QCElemental to
the Debian (Linux distribution) project, and got a rejection from their
ftp admins due to unclear licensing of the NIST fundemental constants
that they obtain from
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/nist-codata-fundamental-physical-constants-srd-121
as well as its associated metadata from
https://catalog.data.gov/harvest/object/14b5729a-4814-409b-8e0a-cd733f06b850
which has your name as contact.

The CODATA physical constants are used in a lot of computational
chemistry packages; they are usually just defined verbatim in the code,
having an external python project like qcelemental makes it easier to
share and update those constants among many projects. Indeed,
qcelemental is a required dependency of the important quantum chemistry
software Psi4.

This is the message I got from the Debian archive admins:

On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 10:00:11PM +0000, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:
> please also take care of the license of:
>  QCElemental-0.5.0/nist_data/srd121_nist-codata-fundamental-physical-constants-2014-metadata.json

The above page at catalog.data.gov references this page as license:

https://www.nist.gov/director/copyright-fair-use-and-licensing-statements-srd-data-and-software

which has this copyright disclaimer for SRD:

|Copyright protection on this compilation of data has been secured by the
|Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce on behalf of the United
|States in the United States and all countries that are parties to the
|Universal Copyright Convention, pursuant to Section 290(e) of Title 15
|of the United States Code.
|
|NIST Standard Reference Data (SRD);
| ©Copyright [©YEAR] by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on behalf of the
|United States of America. All rights reserved.

So far I was under the assumption that the CODATA is in the public
domain, can you clarify whether any license is exercised on the data
mentioned in the metadata JSON file.

Also see the discussion at
https://github.com/MolSSI/QCElemental/issues/136 


Many thanks

Michael Banck, for the Debian project