Hello, I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside Debian with the objective to package free software in life science and medicine for official Debian. Since SignalP belongs to the life sciences section you might like to have a look onto our package containing a long list of just packaged bioinformatics software[1] which provides users with a huge set of programs installable by a single mouse click.
Since Debian only distributes free software (for instance licensed under GPL, BSD or so) we are wondering whether you might consider to publish the source code of this software under a free license. The advantage would be that users of Debian / Ubuntu and its derivatives systems which are quite frequently used in bioinformatics could easily install your software. You also get some additional quality assurance and I can confirm that all authors who decided to open source their software to enable the Debian Med packaging team were happy about this step since it contributed to a wider distribution of their software and a better user response. Many researchers actively avoid non-open-source software, see a discussion from C. Titus Brown: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2015-on-licensing-in-bioinformatics.html under "Why avoid non-open-source software?" Many scientists reported that one of the many benefits they enjoyed with releasing their software under a free or open source license is the improvements they got from other users. I just want to inspire you by other authors that have considered free licenses for instance MEGAN: https://github.com/danielhuson/megan-ce/ (we are currently working to create Debian packages from MEGAN.) Kind regards and thanks for considering Andreas. [1] https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio -- http://fam-tille.de
