On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:41:38PM +0100, Christian Holm Christensen wrote : > Hi Charles, > > On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 19:49 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > Dear all, > > > > I was wondering wether there was a template for letters in which one > > signals to upstream developpers that their software have no licence, and > > explains briefly the differences between GPL, BSD, public domain and no > > licence. > > I do not know of one, though I've probably written about a dozen of > them :-) > > > If not, I will try to write one specific for academic researchers. > > Great idea. I know of at least 2 or 3 popular academic software > packages that could do with such a letter :-)
OK, I will write it this evening. But I am writing one for non-licenced packages. The case of academic software is more difficult, and maybe it would help if we had a discussion on this subject on the list (the kind of slow discussion where one limits himself to one post per day, and where one takes the time to think about an answer before sending it). The biggest difficulty I see is that if we want some real-life examples, then it leads to directly criticize our colleages. For instance, there is a lack of nice free software for visualising sequence traces. I think it is because there are enough good ones for which an academic researcher does not have to pay. Thus we are trained on some software that we have to buy if we want to use it outside academia. This sounds like Microsoft-style strategy, but I think that most researchers do not intend this. Their choices made sense in the past, but the world is changing. So I would like to find the words to express this without implying bad things on my older colleagues. That is why I want to start with unlicenced software for biology. If we are sucessful to provide debian a custom distribution which fits the needs of biologists, then we can start to propose people to relicence some of their works in free software (especially the ones they do not manage to make money with). But not before having produced some respectable work by ourselves, I think... Have a nice day, -- Charles -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
