PHYLIP is now Free Software
Thanks to the main PHYLIP author Joe Felsenstein it is now released under a free license and in Debian main (unstable)
Petition to the copyright holders of Phylip
The members of the Debian Med team and people who are interested in Free Software in biology would like to ask the copyright holders of Phylip to reconsider their licensing conditions. The signers of this petition have a strong interest in including Phylip into the Debian distribution, along with otherwise free tools that inherit portions of the Phylip code (for instance SeaView, Embassy Phylip and others). However, this conflicts with the following phrases of the Phylip license:
- .. the programs are not integrated with or called by any product or service that generates revenue,
- ..
- .. Permission requests for any other distribution of this program should be directed to license @ u.washington.edu
- ..
These phrases are in conflict with items 6., 7. and 9. of the Debian Free Software Guidelines which are widely accepted as Open Source definition because redistribution is restricted to specific cases.
To enable the full integration of Phylip into Debian, as well as Debian derived distributions like Ubuntu and Bio-Linux, we ask the copyright holders to consider a wording that would enable free redistribution. Alternatively you might want to release Phylip under well known free licenses like for instance GPL, Apache, MPL or BSD.
Since the author and copyright holder Joe Felsenstein confirmed that he has been seriously considering asking people responsible for licensing at the University of Washington to put PHYLIP under some Gnu or open license we, the people interested in Free Software in biology would like to support this attempt.
Signing Participants
Name |
Organisation |
|
Andreas Tille |
Debian |
|
Timothy Booth |
UK Natural Environment Research Council, Bio-Linux |
|
Sascha Steinbiss |
Center for Bioinformatics, University of Hamburg, Germany |
|
Olivier Sallou |
University of Rennes 1, France |
|
Aurélien Vallée |
Skype / Microsoft |
|
Gert Wollny |
Technical University of Madrid |
|
Roland Fehrenbacher |
Qlustar / Q-Leap Networks |
|
Charles Plessy |
Debian / RIKEN |
|
Karsten Hilbert |
GNUmed / GP |
|
K. S. Bhaskar |
member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community |
|
Daniel Barker |
University of St Andrews. |
|
Emilien Klein |
member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community |
|
Detlef Wolf |
Roche Innovation Center Basel |
|
Philippe Muller |
member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community |
|
Jorge Soares |
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute |
|
Sebastian Hilbert |
GNUmed / GP |
|
Gregory Sharp |
Massachusetts General Hospital |
|
Ian Wallace |
member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community |
|
Lennart Karssen |
PolyOmica, The Netherlands |
|
Matus Kalas |
University of Bergen |
|
Steffen Möller |
Debian |
|
Christian Cole |
C.Cole.at.dundee.ac.uk |
University of Dundee |
Roger Leigh |
R.Leigh.at.dundee.ac.uk |
University of Dundee |
Kenneth Gillen |
University of Dundee |
If you would like to sign but are to busy registering to this Wiki just send an e-mail to tille@debian.org with subject "Petition to free Phylip" and express whether your e-mail address can be put on this site or if it should be obfuscated. I will proxy your signature to this page to help you signing.