Hi Alex, Thanks for your note. It's something I will consider. In fact, our previous department head, Robert Gentleman, was the author of the R statistical package, and thought we should do this. However, he left our company some time ago, and we are still looking for a department head.
I would also have to consult with our legal department, since the software was built using company resources and on company time. Regards, Tom -- Thomas D. Wu, M.D., Ph.D. Principal Scientist, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Genentech, Inc., 1 DNA Way, South San Francisco, CA 94080 Phone: 650-225-5672, Fax: 650-225-5389 E-mail: [email protected] On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 04:25:50PM +0200, Alex Mestiashvili wrote: > Hi, > > I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team which is a group inside > Debian with the objective to package free software with relevance in > biology and medicine for official Debian. As you might possibly know we > have created packages also from gmap as you can see on our so > called tasks biology page[1]. > > According to the Debian Free Software Guidelines[2] which are widely > accepted as Open Source definition the current license is not free since > it forbids the use and distribution of modified copy under some > conditions and also forbids free use of the software in commercial products. > > I wonder whether you might consider changing the licensing to some free > license like GPL, BSD or MPL - just anything that has no such > restriction to non-commercial use and use of modified code. You might > like to know that several other authors of biologic software recently > switched to free licenses (may be most prominently phylib). The > advantage for you inside Debian would be a higher visibility of gmap > (since we distribute it with metapackages) and a way better quality > assurance since Debian is running several tools to automatically detect > problems inside the distributed software. > > > Kind regards and thanks for your cooperation > > Alex > > [1] http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio#gmap > [2] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines > End of quote
