[Biopython-dev] Dual-licensing Biopython with 3-Clause BSD license

[Peter Cock]

Hello all - does this make sense as a draft email to send to
the main list and announcement list, and post on the blog?

Should we setup a GitHub PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE
file at this point (including the licensing agreement and
a link to the CONTRIBUTING.rst information)?

https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-template-for-your-repository/

Peter

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Dear Biopythoneers,

As I hope you all saw, last week we released Biopython 1.69.

https://news.open-bio.org/2017/04/07/biopython-1-69-released/

One of the important points here is we have started to dual-license
Biopython under both our original liberal “Biopython License
Agreement”, and the very similar but more commonly used
“3-Clause BSD License”.

In Biopython 1.69, small number of the Python files are explicitly
available under either license, but most of the code remains under
the “Biopython License Agreement” only.

For all future contributions (including pull requests), we will ask
new contributors to agree to the dual licensing.

We're trying to get in touch with all our past contributors to get
their explicit agreement, which is well in hand:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython/issues/898

I would ask that all module owners look over the files in their
parts of Biopython, including looking at the version control
history, to make sure the copyright header is complete and
where all contributors to that file have agreed dual license
the file. See the example here:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython/pull/904

Peter