[bip] BSD or...?

[Peter Clarke]

I know of some people who are keen to release code, but don't want to be
obligated into a BSD license and so can't post it to bio.scipy.org.

The true potential of this type of software is only realised when it is in
the hands of command line illiterate biologists. This is perhaps where 'our'
audience differs from other branches of the sciences. The primary market are
not coders, they are biologists. For them an easy interface is the key
ingredient.

The potential commercial gain from wrapping open source software in a user
friendly interface should not be allowed to distort efforts away from
providing these tools to the widest possible audience. Sage
(http://www.sagemath.org)
is trying to accomplish for mathematical software in python and are using
GPL. User interface implementation is dull to code and and so doesn't
attract programmers who are doing it for the love of the coding, but it is
what will allow widespread use of the code. There is still plenty of
commercial oppurtunity for customisation and consultancy.

Enthought, (http://www.enthought.com/) who host the SciPy sites, make their
money from  providing customised easy interfaces to open source python based
scientific software. Many of the tools they integrate are GPLed and they
have released their enthought tool set under open source licenses and
contribute heavily to open source projects. This is a very good thing. It
would be a shame if a similar enterprise for biological python were able to
keep their code to themselves while relying on the contributions of a large
number of true open source developers to produce the tools they build on.

This is why I personally don't like the 'only BSD' rule.

-Peter
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