Dear Dr. Soranzo, I am writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team, a group within the Debian project with the objective to package free software with relevance in biology and medicine for official Debian.
I noticed that you provide a GitHub repository with the SSPACE basic source code [1], under the GPLv2 [2]. This version of SSPACE would in principle be possible to be packaged for Debian, as inclusion into the main archive requires such a free license, allowing for free redistribution. I was wondering how the version that you provide relates to the non-free version (SSPACE standard) provided by Baseclear [3]. Is the one that you provide a different or reduced-functionality version compared to theirs? Most importantly, Baseclear make no mention of any kind of free license — on the contrary, they require users to contact them to obtain the software and also handle commercial users separately, a notion that the GPL does not have. I would be glad if you could clarify how this GPL-licensed version came to be? We would be very thankful if this was a version that the original authors of SSPACE released under a free license, and would be happy to package it for Debian. Many thanks Sascha Steinbiss [1] https://github.com/nsoranzo/sspace_basic [2] https://github.com/nsoranzo/sspace_basic/blob/master/COPYING [3] http://www.baseclear.com/genomics/bioinformatics/basetools/SSPACE
