From owner-bionews@hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Thu May 1 06:54:31 2003 Return-Path: X-Original-To: bionews-outgoing Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Postfix) with SMTP id F33927D160 for ; Thu, 1 May 2003 06:54:30 +0100 (BST) X-Original-To: bionews-list@hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9313D7D200 for ; Thu, 1 May 2003 06:54:30 +0100 (BST) Received: by mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Postfix, from userid 6022) id 4694F7D160; Thu, 1 May 2003 06:54:29 +0100 (BST) X-Original-To: bionet-announce@net.bio.net Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id D4D927D2B2 for ; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:15:05 +0100 (BST) Received: from chi6-1.relay.mail.uu.net (chi6-1.relay.mail.uu.net [199.171.54.98]) by mercury.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5455B7D12E for ; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:15:05 +0100 (BST) Received: from pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk by chi6sosrv13.alter.net with ESMTP (peer crosschecked as: pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.69]) id QQomqv23059 for ; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 13:15:04 GMT Received: from news by pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk with local (Exim 3.34 #1) id 19ArQH-0003TJ-00 for bionet-announce@moderators.isc.org; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:14:57 +0100 To: bionet-announce@moderators.isc.org From: staden-admin@arran.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk (Staden Package Administrator) Newsgroups: bionet.announce Subject: The status of the Staden Package Organization: University of Cambridge, England Message-ID: X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 CURRENT #123 Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 06:54:29 +0100 (BST) Sender: owner-bionews@hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Precedence: bulk As most of you will know despite it receiving excellent referee reports and the highest possible banding the MRC recently declined to fund my grant application to continue the development of our package at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). Thanks for all your messages of support and outrage, but the decision has not been overturned. I feel that to solve the licencing problems which would have arisen with the current release of the package the best solution is to make available a licence which will enable the package to run on any machine in perpetuity. MRC have agreed we can do this and the licence file is now in the ftp site and should be used to replace your existing file(s). We also obtained permission to make a final beta release of the package available. This contains current projects in various states of completion, some of which are already, or would soon have become important new components of the package. Please see the Release Notes for details. This release requires no licence file and is in the ftp site. Further information is available at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/2003.0b1.html In order for the package development to have continued at LMB the collective knowledge and effort of the whole group was required. MRC have declined to fund that, but they have now agreed with my recommendation that the package could become Open Source. However this only makes sense if it is certain that there are sufficient resources available to make it a success. For this to be so requires enough people volunteering to work on the package on the necessary platforms and to add their changes back. The whole operation also needs a coordinator. I request that users discuss the form that an open source licence should take and volunteer their services to help in this effort via the bionet.software.staden newsgroup (or the WWW gateway at http://www.bio.net/). Some of the people emailing have said they were willing to pay to keep the package going. If the volunteered resources are insufficient it may be necessary to resort to some fee paying system. Again this should be discussed via the newsgroup, as can any other ideas for trying to keep the package going. The staden-package and staden-admin emails are unlikely to be manned after April. James has taken a position at the Sanger Institute where he will continue to work on parts of the package. Kathryn, Mark and Yaping are looking for work. Their email addresses are in the package web site. At present I have no firm plans. Unless things change unexpectedly, you are on your own now and need to help one another via the newsgroup. There are enough of you to make it succeed, but it's up to you. Personally I hope the package can continue to be useful and is developed further. From your emails it is clear that, like us, you see that there is much that needs doing and that the package is the ideal platform for many of the interesting and important new sequence related projects that lie ahead. I felt that with the power and flexibility of gap4, plus a new assembly engine and finishing methods, in combination with our mutation detection tools and extensions to spin, we were about to create an even more powerful system for the future. Thanks for your support. Rodger Staden -- Staden Package Administration mailto:staden-admin@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pubseq/ Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, UK. .