On Apr 23, 2009, at 3:02 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 23 April 2009 at 15:32, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel
<e...@debian.org> wrote:
| >
| > (Subject: renamed as thread hijacked from the ParallelR thread
--Dirk)
| >
| > On 23 April 2009 at 14:44, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| > | Aside from R there are the add-on packages.
| > |
| > | A frequency table showing the licenses of the CRAN packages
indicates
| > | that the all or almost all packages have some sort of free
software license
| > | with GPL licenses being most common. (A few packages have
restrictions
| > | to noncommercial use and that may conflict with GPL, not
sure.) That is
| > | not to say that there are no other types of packages but any
such packages
| > | are not on CRAN.
| >
| > I fear that is not quite the case. There are quite a few
packages like that.
|
| Not the case? My post included a list of all License fields from
the
| DESCRIPTION file of every CRAN package so the list is definitive.
Correct me if I am wrong in the paragraph you kindly left standing
above, you
seem to suggest that
"all or almost all packages have some sort of free software license"
and that while non-free licenses may exist,
"any such packages are not on CRAN".
I believe this statement to be false.
There are packages with restrictive licenese on CRAN. They were
contained in
the list of licenses you assembled, and my point is that it is
overly hard to
identify them (if one were to tty to avoid using these packages).
As a non-exhautive list with possible misclassifications, cran2deb
currently
has these packasges as 'maybe not free' and does not build them:
BARD,BayesDA,CoCo,ConvCalendar,FAiR,PTAk,RScaLAPACK,Rcsdp,SDDA,SGP,
alphahull
,ash,asypow,caMassClass,gpclib,mapproj,matlab,mclust,mclust02,
mlbench,optmatch,rankreg,realized,rngwell19937,rtiff,rwt,scagnostics,
sgeostat,spatialkernel,tlnise,xgobi
We are missing some recently added packages, and we may yet flag
several from
the list above as free. Some may be listed because of non-free
Depends:
But to take a concrete example, 'realized' is not something I am
supposed to
install at work. Yet install.packages() currently has not way
knowing that.
Are we approximately on the same page ?
Dirk
There is a list of acceptable entries that are defined as part of the
specs in R-exts (see page 4). Perhaps this needs to be "tightened" a
bit, at least in so far as packages passing R CMD check for the
purpose of inclusion on CRAN. That would include perhaps altering the
ability to use the 'file LICENSE' option, which at present leaves the
door wide open for non-standard approaches. It may also have to check
for DEPENDS and whether they too are on CRAN and passed the
appropriate license checks.
Packages that fail this check should not be included on CRAN and the
package author would then be obligated to find other distribution
resources or contact the CRAN maintainers to advocate that their
licensing schema should be acceptable.
Then the end user can at least have some comfort in knowing that
anything they get from CRAN comes under a compatible license for
general use without restriction. They would have to intentionally use
other sources for packages that fail the CRAN requirements.
If other distribution venues, such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora elect to
tighten those restrictions even further when making .debs or RPMs
available, then that is a decision that they get to make and end users
will need to be aware of those as well. Albeit I don't envision the
aforementioned Linux distros including packages that should be a
problem for most end users relative to usage restrictions given their
own license review processes.
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
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