On Sat, 2 Oct 2010, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
On 10/02/2010 07:38 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:Is there anything on CRAN that is NOT free? I assumed that CRAN had a policy of not accepting anything that could not be freely distributed, but I could not find any such statement in a quick search. The code by Uwe identified 52 packages with "file LICENCE" or "file LICENSE", plus others with combinations of something like GPL with "file LICENCE" or "file LICENSE".I believe the CRAN policy is just that: Freely redistributable. "Free Software" usually means something else: Free usage and modification.
I am sure that is the intention, but a few packages have changed their licence terms since they were accepted. 'mclust' and 'optmatch' are two, and they are not currently 'freely redistributable'.
One main issue is code licensed "free for non-commercial usage" or "academic usage", which are not Free Software. However, CRAN being a repository with many academic users, it does serve a purpose to distribute them for research purposes. [Long discussion omitted of whether that sort of license was ever a good idea....]
I've not seen in this thread mention of the "Licencse/FOSS" filter and option 'checkPackageLicense' - see the help on available.packages() and options() respectively. These do enable people to work within the subset of packages 'known to be Free or Open Source'.
-- Peter Dalgaard Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Phone: (+45)38153501 Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
