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ncbi / cwl-ngs-workflows-cbb

A set of CWL tools and workflows used by NCBI Computational Biology Branch for NGS data analysis
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Clarify Public Domain vs OPL license #88

Closed stain closed 2 years ago

stain commented 3 years ago

https://github.com/ncbi/cwl-ngs-workflows-cbb#public-domain-notice says this repository is public domain.

However, annotations in individual CWL files, like tools/bowtie/bowtie2.cwl says:

s:license: https://spdx.org/licenses/OPL-1.0

The Open Public License is controversial and is not an OSI recognized open source license. GNU says:

This is not a free software license, because it requires sending every published modified version to a specific initial developer. There are also some other words in this license whose meaning we're not sure of that might also be problematic.

The requirement of notifying means anyone using any of these CWL files will need to notify you (and so on), which makes it a non-free license.

Perhaps if the intention is for these contributions to be public domain, the license should be changed to https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0 ?

r78v10a07 commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the comment. I agree that different licenses inside the code may be contradictory.
We removed all s:license: inside the CWLs and updated the LICENSE file to the last NCBI authorized.