[Imgcif-l] Disabling PyCifRW in CBFlib

[Herbert J. Bernstein]

Dear Colleagues,

The Fedora operating system maintainers have discovered a license issue 
for James Hester's PyCifRW package that they feel makes it inappropriate 
for inclusion directly in open source Fedora operating system releases. 
Inasmuch as recent releases of CBFlib have included a copy of PyCifRW to 
support DDLm dictionary checking, this issue then prevents completion of 
the inclusion of CBFlib in Fedora.  CBFlib is already included in Debian.

In order to allow CBFlib to be included in Fedora and to prevent any 
issues from arising in any future updates to Debian, we will be 
temporarily disabling the use of PyCifRW in CBFlib until the PyCifRW 
license issues can be resolved.  This is not in any way a reflection on 
PyCifRW, which is a fine package, and if your system is able to properly 
use PyCifRW within the constraints of the current PyCifRW license, you 
will still be able to use it with CBFlib.

The use of PyCifRW has already been disabled by default in the svn
repository copy of CBFlib_bleeding edge.  Early next week we will be
building release kits of CBFlib both with and without PyCIFRW so that
those who satisfy the PyCifRW license conditions can continue to use
it and the free software operating maintainers will have versions
that do not raise license issue for them.

Our apologies for any difficulty the necessary set of changes may cause.

Regards,
   Herbert J. Bernstein

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  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                  +1-631-244-3035
                  yaya at dowling.edu
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