[Debian-med-packaging] Please allow relicensing for older versions of two single files from PHYLIP

[Joe Felsenstein]

Andreas --

Thanks, particularly for copying my emails to the
author of Seaview.  PHYLIP programs are used
in many other people's products, and I do not
have time to notify them of issues like this.

I don't think the UW licensing people will resist a
change of license.  PHYLIP makes them no
money anyway and basically they don't care about it.

As for helping with the move to Gnu/OS, it will take
awhile (no, probably not in the next 6 months).  You
could help best by:

1. Finding me an Open Source or Gnu license that
requires that the original programmer get some
compensation when the program is sold or access
to it is sold.  I have raised this issue with Gnu/OS
enthusiasts and claimed that there is none.  Some
of them look surprised and say "No, Joe, I'm pretty
sure there is a Gnu license that does that."  I claim
that this is a mythical beast, and belief in it shows
that people have mistaken notions about these
licenses.  But the variety of G/OS licenses is
very great, and I may well have overlooked the
relevant one.

2. Pointing me to a succinct online manual somewhere,
not to the mechanics of Guthub / Sourceforge /
Google Code, but to how to keep a project like
this from having its code polluted by unwanted
"features" put in by well-meaning but self-absorbed
idiots. How to keep it from being steered down
paths requiring great amounts of future work, by people
who will get that started, and then disappear forever.
How to keep some kind of control over "look and
feel".

3. The next time you hear someone say that if
people would only make their code Free, that
it would be so widely used that they would make
lots of money, point out to them PHYLIP, which
has been "free beer" for 33 years now, and has
made me no more than $100 in donations.  No,
that's not $100 per year.  That's total over 33 years.

As to the great excitement that would accompany
the announcement that PHYLIP is now Free, keep
in mind that PHYLIP is not first in the phylogeny
market, but now about 5th (or maybe 6th), after
MrBayes, RAxML, Phyml, MEGA, and maybe
one other, as judged by literature citations.  When
I tried to get money from the NIH program for
funding Development and Maintenance of Existing
Software, they turned me down with the excuse that
PHYLIP was not State Of The Art (of course, it
probably gets more use than the programs whose
development they do fund).

Anyway, enough from me for now.

Joe
----
Joe Felsenstein         joe at gs.washington.edu
 Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
 University of Washington, Box 355065, Seattle, WA 98195-5065 USA