Le Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 12:03:42AM +0200, Thomas Walter a écrit : > > Often applications have > exceptions for non-commercial use or usage for research tasks. The > latter is easily proven when working for an institute or university. > As a conclusion, separating science applications into > main/contrib/non-free does not make much sense in these cases.
Dear all, actually, what drives the "no profit please" attitude is the increasing pressure for the academic centers to make money from their researchs. But this leads to a paradox: If we are to submit patents on our discoveries, can we still say that our works are not for profit, because we do not perform them within a company which has to pay its shareholders? I have seen some academic software taking some free code (BSD style) and releasing their derivatives under a "contact our IP service if you want to make profit" licence. Of course, this is their right, and it can even make sense, for instance if the derived work is the fruit of a collaboration with a for-profit entity. But in many case, it just looks like that it is the default attitude, and I will do my best to avoid behaviors supporting this. There comes the link with the original subject of this thread: while I'll be happy to upload my DFSG-free packages to a science repository when it makes sense, I am a bit affraid that your initiative could end up in a packaging effort of non-free software, which would be detrimental to free software, as well as commercial software when it is not sold by adademia. In molecular biology, there are de facto standards which are given away for free to the persons who learn their jobs, and sold at an expensive price when used "for profit", whatever "for profit" still mean nowardays. No, I am not talking of MS Office, Acrobat Reader or Adobe Photoshop, I am talking of softwares for molecular biology which have no competitors because the "no profit" attitude is in facts similar to the "kill our competitors by giving our product for free" attitude which makes IE, WinMediaPlayer,... so strong. In conclusion, I think that obviously the reason for your initiative is that there are not enough DDs in science, and that this is a true bottleneck for packaging efforts. So the challenge is to do something which does not reinvent the wheel (snapshots, mentors, keyring, ...), but does not encourage to relax debian standards on the other hand. What I like the much in the ideas developped in this thread is the multi-distro backport, because we researchers are very busy and not interested in OS upgrades at work. But in the long term, what we need is more DDs, more DDs and more DDs. Six months of packaging experience is required for starting the new maintainer process, so people interested should start their first package as soon as possible. If you like biology, I have listed programs, their licences, and the feasibility of their packaging in pages such as this one: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSequenceAnalysis Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Wako, Saitama, Japan NM application on hold until october 2006 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
