+1
Commit to freedom if you want the free services of CRAN, etc ...
On 09/11/2009 12:13 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 10 September 2009 at 14:26, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| The SystemRequirements: field of the DESCRIPTION file normally
| lists external dependencies whether free or non-free.
Moreover, the (aptly named) field 'License:' in DESCRIPTION is now much more
parseable and contains pertinent information. A number of more 'challenging'
packages basically pass the buck on with an entry
License: file LICENSE
which refers to a file in the sources one needs to read to decide.
This is e.g. at the basis of Charles' and my decision about what we think we
cannot build via cran2deb [1]: non-free, non-distributable, non-commercial or
otherwise nasty licenses. There are a couple of packages we exclude for this
(or related reasons), and we have been meaning to summarise them with a
simple html summary from the database table we use for cran2deb, but have not
yet gotten around to it.
Just like John and Ravi, I would actually be in favour of somewhat stricter
enforcements. If someone decides not to take part in the gift economy that
brought him or her R (and many other things, including at least 1880+ CRAN
packages with sane licenses) then we may as well decide not to waste our time
and resources on his project either and simply exclude it.
So consider this as a qualified thumbs-up for John and Ravi's suggestion of a
clearer line in the sand.
Dirk
[1] cran2deb is at http://debian.cran.r-project.org and provides 1800+ Debian
'testing' binaries for amd64 and i386 that are continuously updated as new
packages appear on CRAN. With that 'apt-get install r-cran-foo' becomes a
reality for almost every value of foo out of the set of CRAN packages.
|
| On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Prof. John C Nash<nas...@uottawa.ca> wrote:
|> Subject: Non-GPL packages for R
|>
|> Packages that are not licensed in a way that permits re-distribution on
|> CRAN are frequently a source of comment and concern on R-help and other
|> lists. A good example of this problem is the Rdonlp2 package that has caused
|> a lot of annoyance for a number of optimization users in R. They are also an
|> issue for efforts like Dirk Eddelbuettel's cran2deb.
|>
|> There are, however, a number of circumstances where non-GPL equivalent
|> packages may be important to users. This can imply that users need to
|> both install an R package and one or more dependencies that must be
|> separately obtained and licensed. One such situation is where a new
|> program is still under development and the license is not clear, as in
|> the recent work we pursued with respect to Mike Powell's BOBYQA. We
|> wanted to verify if this were useful before we considered distribution,
|> and Powell had been offering copies of his code on request. Thus we
|> could experiment, but not redistribute. Recently Powell's approval to
|> redistribute has been obtained.
|>
|> We believe that it is important that non-redistributable codes be
|> excluded from CRAN, but that they could be available on a repository
|> such as r-forge. However, we would like to see a clearer indication of
|> the license status on r-forge. One possibility is an inclusion of a
|> statement and/or icon indicating such status e.g., green for GPL or
|> equivalent, amber for uncertain, red for restricted. Another may be a
|> division of directories, so that GPL-equivalent packages are kept
|> separate from uncertain or restricted licensed ones.
|>
|> We welcome comments and suggestions on both the concept and the
|> technicalities.
|>
|> John Nash& Ravi Varadhan
--
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http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
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