Hi Yozen, On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 08:11:53PM -0400, Yozen Hernandez wrote: > Dear Andreas, > > Thank you for contacting about packaging TRF. I indeed missed your email. > > Unfortunately, the source code for TRF is not freely available. I do not > know the Debian Free Software Guidelines well enough to decide whether or > not this is allowed,
The Debian Free Software Guidelines[1] are widely accepted as Open Source definition and it is actually that the source code is freely available. > but I may have a solution that I have seen other > packages use. For instance, the Oracle Java packages I have seen ask the > user to accept a license agreement. The package script then goes on to > download the appropriate binary upon acceptance. This could be part of the > RepeatMasker package since TRF is required by that software, and I can > assist by providing the URLs for the i386 and x64 builds. There are several glitches in this suggestion: 1. The Oracle Java packages are not part of Debian. Debian ships with OpenJDK. In so far the comparison is weak. 2. For official Debian packages there is no point to ask for a license since the user can be sure that the installed software is per definition free. 3. Debian packages can only depend from other Debian packages but not from unofficial ones like Oracle Java or your suggested TRF 4. Debian ships for several architectures not only i386 and x64 (in Debian nomenclature amd64). For instance architectures like arm64 and ppc64 might become quite interesting in the near future and we try to care for building on these architectures as well So far for the general considerations. In the specific case of scientific software we also consider the free availability of the source code as very important to prove the correctness of the results and enable reproducibility. So in this case there are extra good reasons for publishing the code. > Another work around could be to ask the user to manually download and > install TRF themselves by providing them with the URL to our downloads page. As said above a Debian package is not allowed to depend from external resources. > I understand that these are not ideal solutions, but for the forseeable > future we will not license TRF under a free software license. I have no idea whether this might be open for discussion at your site and what might be the motivation to keep the code of a scientific tool closed. In case you might like to re-think it I'd like to point out the following advantages: Due to the work of the Debian Med team Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu gained quite some coverage in biological research. Providing TRF via Debian packages does not only simplify the installation and maintenance for users (you might keep cluster installations in mind). The fact that we are providing so called metapackages depending from all biological applications installing any application you see on this so called tasks page[2] might bring TRF automatically on users computers who might become aware of your tool just because it is included here and you might gain additional users of your software. As you can see on the tasks page[2] we also put some importance on specifying the according publications which gives the authors of the software some extra credit. I could give several more good reasons but I don't know your motivation to keep the source code closed and may be you could rethink the decision by including the arguments above. Kind regards Andreas. [1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines [2] http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio -- http://fam-tille.de