Le Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 11:51:35AM +0000, Tim Booth a écrit : > > I'll be up at the EBI in a couple of weeks. Is there anything I can do > to try and persuade them to grant an acceptable license or has this > already been tried? EMBOSS is a software package that I still consider > to be very important, even though development is currently stalled due > to lack of funding.
Hi Tim, The non-free file is a Uniprot record in the test suite, so the EMBOSS developers can not re-license it. Actually, I am wondering if, in isolation from the whole UniProt database, a single record is copyrightable, since it is only the reproduction of facts. In that case, we could simply ignore its license. I have asked Debian's FTP team their opinion on that matter. http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2012/03/msg00010.html Among the other options, there is the removal of the file from the package. This is something I dislike, as it is extra work for no extra freedom. The conceptual problem is that the purpose of that file is to test that EMBOSS properly parses UniProt records, so it is obviously impossible to replace. The other problem is that other packages, for instance BioPerl, also contain UniProt records in their test suite. This is a nightmare that I find very demotivating. Please give my best regards to the EMBOSS developers. I think that the best they can do is to lobby UniProt to release test data in the public domain, or to relicense their whole database under a free license. All illogical it may sound, we need the permission to modify the protein sequences against scientific evidence, even if we do not plan to ever do it. By the way: one of the reasons I have not updated emboss is also that I am stuck with other packaging works, in particular libsnappy-java where I have reached my level of incompetence (http://bugs.debian.org/636181). I have already wasted some time from Andreas and Java developers, but I think that the only way out would be that somebody takes the work over entirely. We need libsnappy-java to update the picard-tools. Lastly, the request I made was to remove emboss from Testing, but this is not a request for removal from Debian, and I really aim at shipping an up-to-date EMBOSS in Wheezy. Cheers, -- Charles -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120305122540.gd28...@falafel.plessy.net
