[Scitech] cufflinks (Was: Ask for advice!)
Hi,
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 11:42:03AM +0100, Dave Love wrote:
> RNA-seq results by using TopHat and Cufflinks softwares.
cufflinks appears to be non-free, in which case it can't go into Fedora,
though there doesn't seem to have been a ruling from fedora-legal on it.
The "non-free-ness" in Debian is caused by the use of locfit. I'm quoting
the relevant section from debian/copyright:
Files: src/locfit/*
Copyright: © 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories.
© 1996-2001 Catherine Loader.
License: Locfit
ABOUT ALGORITHMS:
The Locfit implementation has been designed largely from the point
of view of generality: to provide a set of functions that can be
used for as wide a range of local fitting problems as possible.
It is not intended to be the fastest or most efficient implementation
possible. In addition to generality, the code in many places makes
extensive trade-offs made between speed and numerical accuracy (some
of which can be controlled through optional arguments). Many of Locfit's
options will only be used in a small fraction of cases; for other cases,
they add to the cost of overhead (an obvious example is multi-dimensional
fitting: when used in 1-d, many loops reduce to for(i=0;i<1;i++)).
Additionally, the user interfaces (i.e. the R and S-Plus code) add
significantly to the computational overhead. For these reasons, the
Locfit code, as distributed, should not, and can not, be used to
derive meaningful benchmarks, either for the speed or accuracy of algorithms.
Anyone wishing to use Locfit in any kind of comparative benchmark
study must contact and obtain permission from the Author.
.
COPYRIGHT:
.
Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories.
SCB code is
Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Jiayang Sun.
.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
purpose (with the exceptions noted in `About Algorithms' above)
without fee is hereby granted, and provided that this entire notice is
included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or
modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting
documentation for such software.
.
THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
WARRANTY. IN PARTICULAR, NEITHER THE AUTHOR NOR LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE
MERCHANTABILITY OF THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Comment: the files contain “See README file for details.” and the license
displayed above is from the README file of the locfit source available at
http://stat.bell-labs.com/project/locfit/dist/locfit.tgz
Source: http://stat.bell-labs.com/project/locfit
So while the code is free software the restriction:
... should not, and can not, be used to
derive meaningful benchmarks, either for the speed or accuracy of algorithms.
is something what is regarded as non-free by Debian. I several times
tried to contact the authors about this but never got any response.
I'd be interested about the opinion of fedora-legal.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de