On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Sarah Goslee wrote:
While looking at someone's question on this list led me to the mclust
package, and from there to its license.
Excerpts:
Except for strict academic use, use of MCLUST (by itself or through other
packages) requires payment of an annual license fee and completion of a
license agreement found at the following URL:
http://depts.washington.edu/ventures/UW_Technology/Express_Licenses/mclust.php
1. the MCLUST software, including any modifications you may have made to it,
remains at your Institution and is not published, distributed, or
otherwise transferred or made available in whole or in part, modified or
unmodified, to other than Institution employees and/or students under your
direct supervision;
Someone installing mclust using install.packages() might never see
this information,
and in fact mclust is in the Multivariate task view so it's installed
on my computers.
I don't believe I've ever used it, which is a good thing since I'm not
a strict academic!
Is there any way to flag packages like this, with restrictive or
unusual licenses. I tend to assume that anything on CRAN is GPL and
not worry about it, but obviously that's untrue.
This is why we have filters="license/FOSS" in available.packages(),
and files etc/licensed.site and .R/licensed (see ?library). You can
easily set your R up to never install not-claimed-to-be-FOSS packages.
(The history of mclust is rather unfortunate: the license was changed
long after it was accepted by CRAN, and by then it had several
packages depending on it.)
It does seem appropriate that the task views highlight the restrictive
license, so I've Cc:ed the maintainers.
--
Brian D. Ripley, [email protected]
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
______________________________________________
[email protected] 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.
