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)

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:

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

E-Mail

Organisation

Andreas Tille

tille@debian.org

Debian

Timothy Booth

tbooth@ceh.ac.uk

UK Natural Environment Research Council, Bio-Linux

Sascha Steinbiss

steinbiss@zbh.uni-hamburg.de

Center for Bioinformatics, University of Hamburg, Germany

Olivier Sallou

olivier.sallou@irisa.fr

University of Rennes 1, France

Aurélien Vallée

aurelien.vallee@skype.net

Skype / Microsoft

Gert Wollny

gert@die.upm.es

Technical University of Madrid

Roland Fehrenbacher

rf@q-leap.de

Qlustar / Q-Leap Networks

Charles Plessy

plessy@debian.org

Debian / RIKEN

Karsten Hilbert

Karsten.Hilbert@gmx.net

GNUmed / GP

K. S. Bhaskar

bhaskar@bhaskars.com

member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community

Daniel Barker

db60@st-andrews.ac.uk

University of St Andrews.

Emilien Klein

emilien+debian@klein.st

member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community

Detlef Wolf

detlef.wolf@roche.com

Roche Innovation Center Basel

Philippe Muller

philippe.muller@gmail.com

member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community

Jorge Soares

j.s.soares@gmail.com

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Sebastian Hilbert

Sebastian.Hilbert@gmx.net

GNUmed / GP

Gregory Sharp

gregsharp.geo@yahoo.com

Massachusetts General Hospital

Ian Wallace

iankarlwallace@gmail.com

member of the worldwide free / open source software enthusiasts community

Lennart Karssen

l.c.karssen@polyomica.com

PolyOmica, The Netherlands

Matus Kalas

matus.kalas@uib.no

University of Bergen

Steffen Möller

steffen_moeller@gmx.de

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

k.h.gillen@dundee.ac.uk

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.

Further reading

  1. Debian Free Software Guidelines

  2. The Open Source Definition (Annotated)

  3. FAQ about Debian Free Software Guidelines

  4. Debian popcon usage statistics for phylip package

  5. Mail from PHYLIP author Joe Felsenstein

  6. Phylip Facebook page