[jkbonfield]

I just downloaded to check and it states clearly to be Public Domain, so it should be free to do whatever you want with it assuming all code is their own. I suspect it is too as for curiosity I looked at the nastier parts of SRF implementation and see they completely reimplemented the interlaced-deflate algorithm used in staden-io_lib (which itself is under a BSD licence so they could easily have lifted it verbatim).

Maybe they didn't like my coding style, or perhaps like me just enjoyed writing a compression algorithm. :-) Hmm, I wonder how theirs performs. It's got lots of very carefully crafted bit twiddling in there so someone put a lot of effort into it.

[srasdk]

All NCBI software is "Public Domain" - read Wikipedia if in doubt what does it mean.

Many pieces are rewritten to either avoid extra licensing restriction or to simplify complex structure of another library. Staden-io_lib was rewritten long time ago - for TraceArchive.

The only extra library SRA API needs for accessing data is libz. Some other tools may need libbz2, libxml2 and libhdf5

For the curious, SRA single-file format represents a directory. You can use "kar" utility to convert between real directory and single file. Files named "data" are blobs indexed by files named "idx*". The data in blobs is structured and compressed with methods picked carefully for every datatype. All of the rules are recorded in metafiles "md/cur".
Metadata also contains the rules for producing "virtual" datatypes. For example, you can read FASTA type through API while physical data is 2na or even colorspace.

As a result, the format is impossible to document easily - a staff of technical writers would be needed to do it. As for the openness and sharing - having source code available does qualify for it.

[maubp]

...

As a result, the format is impossible to document easily - a staff of technical writers would be needed to do it. As for the openness and sharing - having source code available does qualify for it.

That basically confirms James' surmise early. Thanks.

[isaac.turner]

An example of how to use the API can be found here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/viewvc/v1/trunk/sra/doc/SRA_1-1/SRAToolkit.pdf?view=co

Although it is quite old (2009). Did anyone make any progress on this?