Re: Guix and Bioconductor.

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Giovanni Biscuolo <address@hidden> writes:

> To all Guix interested in Bioconductor,
>
> forgive me if I raise this question here and not to "upstream", but IMHO
> this issue should escalate to Bioconductor and Guix community could do
> better than single package maintainers, zimoun in this case
>
> I'm not a user of Bioconductor packages so I have no "weight" on this
> matter, but I guess in Guix community there are **many** (potential?)
> users of Bioconductor packages: could you please organize a "pressure
> group" to convince Bioconductor be strict in their package acceptance
> rules?
>
> I fear flowPeacks will not be the last package with this kind licensing
> problems

It sure isn’t.  In the past I have tried to do a mass import from
Bioconductor and what slows me down the most is incorrect or non-free
licensing.  There are some packages that declare to be licensed under
Artistic 2.0, but then actually they contain data from databases that
do not permit commercial use.  Or they contain a copy of non-free tools,
or only work when those tools are present (e.g. kent tools, of which we
provide a package containing the few free tools).

It’s a pretty frustrating process to weed out these packages.

> Since «Bioconductor is committed to open source, collaborative,
> distributed software development and literate, reproducible research.» [1]

CRAN appears to be stricter about licenses (even though “strict” is
probably much too strong a word…).  Bioconductor people appear to care a
little less.

--
Ricardo