[med-svn] r18451 - trunk/community/bits

[Andreas Tille]

Author: tille
Date: 2014-11-05 13:09:43 +0000 (Wed, 05 Nov 2014)
New Revision: 18451

Modified:
   trunk/community/bits/2014-11.bits
Log:
Add PHYLIP paragraph


Modified: trunk/community/bits/2014-11.bits
===================================================================
--- trunk/community/bits/2014-11.bits	2014-11-05 12:52:22 UTC (rev 18450)
+++ trunk/community/bits/2014-11.bits	2014-11-05 13:09:43 UTC (rev 18451)
@@ -63,9 +63,40 @@
 3. Packages moved from non-free to main
 =======================================
 
-The Debian Med team worked hard to finally enable DFSG free licenses
-for Phylip and other package based on this tool.
+The Debian Med team worked hard to finally enable DFSG free licenses for
+PHYLIP[3a] and other package based on this tool.  PHYLIP is well known
+in bioinformatics and actually one of the first packages in this field
+inside Debian (oldest changelog entry 28 Aug 1998).  Since then it was
+considered non-free because its use was restricted to scientific /
+non-commercial use and also has the condition that you need to pay some
+fee to the University of Washington if you intend to use it in a
+commercial setup.
 
+Since Debian Med was started we were in continuous discussion with the
+author Joe Felsenstein.  We even started an online petition[3b] to show
+how large the interest in a DFSG free PHYLIP might be.  As a side note:
+This petition was *not* presented to the authors since they happily
+decided to move to a free license because of previous discussion and
+since they realised that the money they "gained" over they years was
+only a few dollars.  The petition is just mentioned for the purpose that
+readers of these bits get some idea what you can do in similar cases to
+show what a large team behind a certain topic can approach.
+
+So finally PHYLIP was released in September under a BSD-2-clause license
+and in turn SeaView[3c] (a similarly famous programm and also long term
+non-free citizen) depending on PHYLIP code was freed as well.  There are
+several other tools like python-biopython and python-cogent which are
+calling PHYLIP if it exists.  We can now stop removing those parts of
+the test suites of these tools that are using PHYLIP which is for the
+profit of those indirect PHYLIP usage.
+
+Thanks to all who participated in freeing PHYLIP specifically its author
+Joe Felsenstein.
+
+[3a] http://evolution.genetics.washington.edu/phylip.html
+[3b] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012/ePetition_Phylip
+[3c] http://doua.prabi.fr/software/seaview
+
 4. Autopkgtest in Debian Med packages
 =====================================