In a bionet.general article
<m8xndjc at rpi.edu> lear at turbo.bio.net (Eliot) writes:
>Announcing a new bionet newsgroup: bionet.software.sources
>>sciences. An example would be the FASTA gene sequence similarity
>searching routines, written by Bill Pearson. The group is moderated,
One of the reasons I suspect this group won't work too well is that
biology software sources for public distribution are often hard
to come by. I ran into this problem with, for example but not
limited to, FASTA by Bill Pearson. Last time I checked, this
source could not be redistributed freely as the University or Pearson
has a copyright and a provision preventing free redistribution
from other sites.
Sources for a few multiple sequence aligners, Clustal (previous
version) and another I (and most everyone else) has forgotten, also
fall in this category. If you are not the author of a program with
source code, check that the author explicitly allows redistribution
before posting.
By the way, I also have been reluctant to distribute source to some
of my Mac programs. At one time I earned a living writing software.
It is difficult to do, and giving away one's work makes it even more
difficult.
On the other hand, software programs are frequently built on the
shoulders of other software source code. Having no good, widely
available sources will hamper progress in this field.
-- Don
--
Don Gilbert gilbert at bio.indiana.edu
biocomputing office, biology dept., indiana univ., bloomington, in 47405
