[EMBOSS] Redistribution terms of PHILIPNEW.

[Charles Plessy]

Dear EMBOSS developers,

I am preparing a Debian package for EMBASSY’s PHILIPNEW package. The
redistribution terms of Phyilp itself are:

/* version 3.6. (c) Copyright 1993-2002 by the University of Washington.
   Written by Joseph Felsenstein, Akiko Fuseki, Sean Lamont, Andrew Keeffe,
   and Dan Fineman.
   Permission is granted to copy and use this program provided no fee is
   charged for it and provided that this copyright notice is not removed. */

And for its documentation:

   Copyright 1986-2000 by the University of
   Washington.  Written by Joseph Felsenstein.  Permission is granted to copy 
   this document provided that no fee is charged for it and that this copyright 
   notice is not removed. 

I see that the documentation in emboss-doc is a derivative of the Phylip
documentation. What are the redistribution terms for it ?

For the rest of the EMBOSS-specific work, there is a hint that the license
could be the GNU GPL, since this is what the COPYING file contains, but the GNU
GPL does not allow linking to software that prohibits commercial use. As
copyright holders, you are not yourself bound by the GPL, so this does not
prevent you from distributing PHYLIPNEW, but this buggy situation makes it
un-redistributable for third parties like Debian.

But maybe the license of the EMBASSY part of PHYLIPNEW is not the GNU GPL… Can
you clarify?

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan