Hi, as you can see in the longish discussion on the "Intend to Package" claim to package locfit for Debian[1] the license of locfit is problematic. I'm more and more stumbling upon use cases of locfit from CRAN (recently in DESeq - thus the author Simon Anders is explicitly CCed) but also in edgeR and lots of other frequently used BioConductor packages.
The license for locfit on CRAN[2] is "GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]" but this is wrong. Most parts of the code in src/*.c are licensed under the following terms: ABOUT ALGORITHMS: The Locfit implementation has been designed largely from the point of view of generality: to provide a set of functions that can be used for as wide a range of local fitting problems as possible. It is not intended to be the fastest or most efficient implementation possible. In addition to generality, the code in many places makes extensive trade-offs made between speed and numerical accuracy (some of which can be controlled through optional arguments). Many of Locfit's options will only be used in a small fraction of cases; for other cases, they add to the cost of overhead (an obvious example is multi-dimensional fitting: when used in 1-d, many loops reduce to for(i=0;i<1;i++)). Additionally, the user interfaces (i.e. the R and S-Plus code) add significantly to the computational overhead. For these reasons, the Locfit code, as distributed, should not, and can not, be used to derive meaningful benchmarks, either for the speed or accuracy of algorithms. Anyone wishing to use Locfit in any kind of comparative benchmark study must contact and obtain permission from the Author. . COPYRIGHT: . Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories. SCB code is Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Jiayang Sun. . Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose (with the exceptions noted in `About Algorithms' above) without fee is hereby granted, and provided that this entire notice is included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting documentation for such software. . THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY. IN PARTICULAR, NEITHER THE AUTHOR NOR LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE MERCHANTABILITY OF THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Fedora came to the same conclusion when discussing the usage of locfit in cufflinks[3] that locfit is a show stopper for Free Software. The locfit code on CRAN is not including a copy of the text above and thus is violating the license. Moreover the clause "should not, and can not, be used to derive meaningful benchmarks" makes the code non-free since it adds a usage restriction. The Debian Med team repeatedly tried to contact upstream authors of locfit but failed. All seem to have vanished and my mal to Bell Labs remained unanswered (seems free software is not important enough for them). The conclusion is: Do not use locfit in Free Software. Specifically do not use it by breaking the license conditions and leave out the licensing text from upstream. Please also help to find upstream authors to discuss more constructive licensing terms. Kind regards Andreas. [1] https://bugs.debian.org/731599 [2] https://cran.r-project.org/package=locfit [3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=694998 -- http://fam-tille.de