[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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