Dear Sascha,
thanks for contacting me about the SSPACE-basic repository. The
repository contains a copy of the "basic" version of SSPACE, which was
released by Baseclear years ago under the GPL (v2 or later) and then
discontinued. Then they removed all traces of this version from their
website, as you have found out, but you can easily find mention of
SSPACE basic on various forums, e.g.:
http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8350&page=8
SSPACE standard is a completely different version (at least license-wise).
The first commit of the repository
https://github.com/nsoranzo/sspace_basic/commit/652d24aa74a3b45774db43b3483e71e40572a553
contains an exact copy of the files I downloaded at the time from
http://www.baseclear.com/download.php?file_id=1038 , the other commits
are patches from me.
I'd very happy if you package SSPACE-basic and I'd happy to accept
patches to make the software more "packageable" if needed.
Cheers,
Nicola
--
Nicola Soranzo, Ph.D.
Data Infrastructure & Algorithms group
The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC)
Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7UH, UK
http://www.tgac.ac.uk/sequencing-informatics/
On 04/06/16 16:49, Sascha Steinbiss wrote:
Dear Dr. Soranzo,
I am writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team, a group within the Debian
project with the objective to package free software with relevance in biology
and medicine for official Debian.
I noticed that you provide a GitHub repository with the SSPACE basic source
code [1], under the GPLv2 [2]. This version of SSPACE would in principle be
possible to be packaged for Debian, as inclusion into the main archive requires
such a free license, allowing for free redistribution.
I was wondering how the version that you provide relates to the non-free
version (SSPACE standard) provided by Baseclear [3]. Is the one that you
provide a different or reduced-functionality version compared to theirs? Most
importantly, Baseclear make no mention of any kind of free license — on the
contrary, they require users to contact them to obtain the software and also
handle commercial users separately, a notion that the GPL does not have.
I would be glad if you could clarify how this GPL-licensed version came to be?
We would be very thankful if this was a version that the original authors of
SSPACE released under a free license, and would be happy to package it for
Debian.
Many thanks
Sascha Steinbiss
[1] https://github.com/nsoranzo/sspace_basic
[2] https://github.com/nsoranzo/sspace_basic/blob/master/COPYING
[3] http://www.baseclear.com/genomics/bioinformatics/basetools/SSPACE
