[ensembl-announce] Potential update to Ensembl license

[Paul Flicek]

Dear Ensembl users and developers,

Since our launch in 1999, the Ensembl software has been licensed under a lightly modified Apache version 1 license (http://www.ensembl.org/info/about/legal/code_licence.html).  In 2004 Apache itself stopped using this license in f savour of the Apache version 2 license, which has since developed into one of the standard and most widely used permissive licenses in open source software.  For those interested, details of Apache's licenses and their history is here http://www.apache.org/licenses/.

At Ensembl we are considering updating the license for all of Ensembl code for which we have copyright to the Apache version 2 license.  This change will have the benefit of being more explicit in the rights granted and by adopting a well known and highly used license, we also believe that this will be organisations wishing to use our code will better understand how our code is licensed.  We believe there is wide comfort and experience using the Apache version 2 license within the community.

Most importantly, we believe that this change would allow all of our users to do exactly the same things they are doing now and support them to build new and great things.

This proposed license change will also apply to the eHive code parts of which are licensed "under the same terms as Perl itself."

If you have any comments or questions about this change please contact me directly (i.e. please do not reply to the list) by 1 February 2013 if possible.  I will post back a summary of questions and comments received (if any) along with any further news.  

This change to the Ensembl software license will not effect the status of the data within Ensembl, which is provided without any restriction by the project. 

Thank you for your continued support of Ensembl.

Paul Flicek