Ian Fellows wrote:
Hi All,
I was cruising around today, and came across a company (ZumaStat) that adds
additional statistics functionality to SPSS.
From the Website:
http://www.zumastat.com/robust_statistics.htm
"ZumaStat provides a user friendly interface to access powerful statistical
programs on robust statistics that are available in the computer package
called R, which is available free. Most of the R functions were written by
Professor Rand Wilcox of the University of Southern California and are
described in his three books:"
It seems unlikely that the functionality of this program can be separated
from the R-packages upon which it relies, thus making them one work subject
to GPL. Does anyone have any experience with this software/company? Any
thoughts?
As far as I can see they are using R to run prof. Wilcox's R functions.
This is not the same as the "robust" package. Judging from his website,
prof. Wilcox doesn't believe in packaging nor licencing; all his
functions are just stored in one big file. However, even if he had a GPL
on his code, there's no telling whether he did a dual licencing deal
with ZumaSoft. As it stands, I suspect that he's just happy with the
exposure his books are getting.
That leaves the question of whether they might be infringing upon R
itself. There ae some really murky legal areas around linking, plugins,
and interfacing to GPL'd programs (when does something become a
"derivative work"?), but I don't think this is a good case to test them out.
--
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
(*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907
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