[Debichem-devel] Bug#1076519: Bug#1076519: libinchi1: new version 1.07 of InChI (now MIT license scheme)

[Andrius Merkys]

Control: reassign -1 src:inchi 1.03+dfsg-4

Dear Norwid,

On 7/17/24 19:58, Norwid Behrnd via Debichem-devel wrote:
> I hereby request the update of the InChI package as provided by DebiChem.
> 
> At present, download and installation of libinchi1/libinchi-bin from the
> repositories of Debian 13/trixie provides the software equivalent to version
> 1.03/June 15, 2010.  While Andrius Merkys thankfully packaged this version in
> 2019, there already was the request to provide the community a package
> corresponding to a more recent version of InChI.  However, starting with
> version 1.04 (September 2011), InChI trust adopted a license scheme which did
> not comply Debian's policies (see, for example [1]).
> 
> Today Wednesday, 2024-07-17, the InChI trust released a new version 1.07 of the
> software.  In addition to revised and extended functionality, the open source
> project hosted on GitHub[2] now adopts the MIT license scheme.

Thanks for noticing about the release of InChI v1.07.0. However, the new 
version contains licensing inconsistencies of which I have informed the 
upstream some five months ago [3]. In strict sense these inconsistencies 
block the update of InChI in Debian. I am aware that the overall 
intention of InChI developers is to have InChI MIT licensed, but looking 
solely at the source tarball the license is not clear.

> [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/inchi/mailman/message/37365947/
> [2] https://github.com/IUPAC-InChI/InChI

[3] https://github.com/IUPAC-InChI/InChI/issues/8

Best,
Andrius