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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

Kai Kupferschmidt reports in Science Magazine that Gangolf Jobbi is revoking the license to use his bioinformatics software, Treefinder, for researchers working in eight European countries [sciencemag.org] (Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark) because those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders. "Immigration to my country harms me, it harms my family, it harms my people. [treefinder.de] Whoever invites or welcomes immigrants to Europe and Germany is my enemy,” says Jobb. Treefinder has been used in hundreds of scientific papers to build phylogenetic trees, diagrams showing the most likely evolutionary relationship of various species [wikipedia.org], from sequence data. Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable, several scientists say.

"I'd say not being able to use Treefinder would be no great loss to anyone,” says Sandra Baldauf, a biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. A paper co-authored by Baldauf last year in Current Biology used Treefinder primarily because a colleague had long worked with it, she says; now that that researcher has left, Baldauf uses "the underlying software (Consel), which is the real analytical power behind Treefinder anyway,” she wrote in an email. And after reading Jobb's statement, "I would stop using [Treefinder] just on general principle, even if we had to resort to using pencil and paper.” [themarysue.com] The affair shows that it is important for scientists to be knowledgeable about licensing issues when using software, says Antoine Branca. Because Jobb owns the licence, he can restrict it as he sees fit. Licenses like the GNU General Public License, on the other hand, grant users rights to use, study, share, and even modify the software freely. "Maybe people will be more aware of this now,” Branca says.

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