New features are outlined here
The following is the text of a message about the future of the package sent to all licence holders on 30th April, 2003.
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 here here.
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
We have made a beta-test release of the Staden Package. This is a snapshot of the current in-house code, and so it should not be considered as an official and tested/bug-fixed release. Licence file checking has been removed from this release. Please read the release notes for more information and go to the downloads page to obtain a copy.
The 2002.0 release in the ftp site now contains a licence.txt included with the unix tar files and the window self-extracting .exe. People downloading this new release do not need to obtain a licence file. People with the old release who wish to unlock the package for all systems should download the licence.txt file separately from here.
We are still receiving lots of queries about the licences. PLEASE read the statement from the 2nd April regarding existing licences. Also please do not request licences through any other method than filling out the web form here. Including your details in an email is likely to slow down progress and may, in the worse case, cause the licence request to be missed.
We can produce licences for domain names (eg .mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk) or IP address ranges (131.111.85.x), but these will only work if your machine is correctly configured and actually knows its hostname or IP address (you'd be suprised how many don't!). Please do not ask for such a form of licence unless either the IP address of hostname is listed in the licence start-up screen when launching the programs.
Once a decision has been made regarding the long term future of the package details will be posted here.
Until then, it would be helpful for us if people used the Staden Package newsgroup (bionet.software.staden) for posting general support queries and the like.
Also note that the existing package licences will continue to work indefinitely. They will not expire at the end of the month and they will continue to work until something invalidates the licence (such as changing IP addresses or hostname for example). The package is still available for download and we are still issuing new licences, and will continue to do so for as long as we can.