Thank you for the suggestions. I've generally relied on task views to simplify package installation, and not paid much attention to other options.
I also see that mclust does notify the user when loaded: > library(mclust) by using mclust, invoked on its own or through another package, you accept the license agreement in the mclust LICENSE file and at http://www.stat.washington.edu/mclust/license.txt Time to uninstall, as that's so much easier than trying to justify government research as "academic" to my administration and theirs. Sarah On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org ______________________________________________ [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.
