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

[Joe Felsenstein]

Andreas --

Thanks for the comments.  Your comments on
the Gnu guidelines has saved me from wasting
time looking for the Unicorn.

> As far as I know all these hosting platforms are doing some kind of user
> management were the project leader can add / refuse new programmers.
> Considering the lot of projects which are trying to approach the very
> same as you describe above I think it is not a technical but rather a
> social problem which you are describing.  Since I learned that you can
> not fix a social problem by technical means I think that the answer
> above is rather:  Any of the platforms above are similarly good - it
> just depends how well you manage your project.

What I want to achieve is some control over look-and-feel,
and some veto over new "helpful" features that may not
be helpful (and may even not do correct analyses).  Perhaps if
there is some way that I could have this control over releases
that are called PHYLIP while everyone else can fork all they
want but has to call it something else.  I am not sure that my
judgement is good enough to exercise it only by choice of who
gets added as a programmer.

I regret that a change of license by July is very unlikely, as
that would have to coincide with release of a new (alpha
release) version 4.0 and there is still a lot of work to do on
that to even get to alpha release, and these days I have no
programmers working for me.  I may however be able to
get the license change done on the two programs required
by Seaview.

By the way, the new 4.0 will have Java front ends for all the
programs (like Drawgram and Drawtree do in 3.695).  A
programmer working for me last year found a way to do
that which did not prevent the programs being used standalone
as well.  I am not sure whether having Java code in the
release affects the Gnu/OS issue.  I know that Oracle makes
Java a bit less than open.  I am wary about getting too
committed to Java when there may be unpleasant surprises
in the future, but at this point it was the only easy path to
a cross-platform GUI.

In general the future looks somewhat scary, with platforms
like Apple's iOS which do not allow programmers to do things
in a generic way, but insist you use their environment.
Programming itself may become impossible, leaving us just
making Apps by drag-and-drop.

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