Martin,
what about setting up a new mailing list R-hcgs?
(acronym for R - The hidden costs of GPL software?)
Seems to be worth given the amount of messages in this thread(s). ;-)
Uwe
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On 24-Nov-04 John wrote:
Off hand, the costs of GPL'd software are not hidden at all.
R for instance demands that a would be user sit down and
learn the language. This in turn pushes a user into learning
more about statistics than the simple overview that Stat 1
presents a student.
I'd see
]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, Cliff Lunneborg
[EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted John Fox:
Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the current static
(and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R
documentation
: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM
To: Cliff Lunneborg
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, Cliff Lunneborg
[EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted John Fox:
Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the current static
(and, in my view
On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 17:40, roger koenker wrote:
Having just finished an index I would like to second John's comments.
Even as an author, it is difficult to achieve some degree of
completeness and consistency.
Of course, maybe a real whizz at clustering could assemble something
very
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Duncan Murdoch
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM
To: Cliff Lunneborg
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL
://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Duncan Murdoch
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM
To: Cliff Lunneborg
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs
Patrick Burns wrote:
[]
No, I'm not volunteering to build the system.
Too bad! ;-)
Indeed, the idea to index tens of thousands of functions could not be
appealing to many of us! Why not to consider to test such ideas at the
package level? I mean, building a system that points out the
At 11/23/2004 11:45 AM Tuesday, Patrick Burns wrote:
...There could be an index builder that accepts a search phrase and
the function or package that is the successful answer to the search.
If this were open, then R users could contribute to the index who
don't feel qualified to submit code. It
On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Patrick Burns wrote:
[]
No, I'm not volunteering to build the system.
Too bad! ;-)
Indeed, the idea to index tens of thousands of functions could not be
appealing to many of us! Why not to consider to test such ideas at the
package
Off hand, the costs of GPL'd software are not hidden at all. R for instance
demands that a would be user sit down and learn the language. This in turn
pushes a user into learning more about statistics than the simple overview
that Stat 1 presents a student.
In contrast, any program that
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, Cliff Lunneborg
[EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted John Fox:
Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the
current static (and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R
documentation with the requirement that package authors supply their own
keywords for
Grosjean'
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
I agree with Bert. Thanks to all who contributed. I'd like to
add one comment I didn't see in the thread so far:
The corporate legal where I work is deathly afraid of the GNU
General Public License (GPL), because
John Fox wrote:
[...] (sorry, this is long mail, and I want to comment only details)
By the way, if there were
something I could wish for here it would be a slightly
broader set of Tk widgets to be included with the Tcl/Tk that
installs with R for Windows, since using widgets outside of
If the GPL were not so tight on this point, someone could
commercialize a GUI for R without having to offer their source code
under the GPL.
There is nothing in GPL to stop a commercial GUI for R. Have a look at
what Apple do. They have a complete commercial GUI and numerous
applications
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Bill Northcott wrote:
If the GPL were not so tight on this point, someone could
commercialize a GUI for R without having to offer their source code
under the GPL.
There is nothing in GPL to stop a commercial GUI for R. Have a look at what
Apple do. They have a
John Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I don't think that
it would be hard (although it would be time-consuming) to produce a much
broader extension, but the result (in my opinion) would be as dubiously
useful as the GUIs for SAS or S-PLUS.
Strategically, that might actually be a valid (and
). This is
exactly what I do in the tcltk2 package.
Best,
Philippe Grosjean
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Dalgaard
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 11:46 AM
To: John Fox
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
[...]
Strategically, that might actually be a valid (and valiant)
design goal! From my limited experience with Rcmdr and SAS
Analyst, I'd say that Rcmdr is almost there, just a few
little niggles like not remembering values from the last time
a form was filled in.
Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Peter,
You don't need the ActiveState Tcl distribution to add extensions. If you
compile extensions yourself (and these extensions have a compatible
license), then you have no problems... (well, almost! You must make sure
those extensions compile
At 09:45 PM 11/18/2004, John Fox wrote:
[...]
6) As has been pointed out, e.g., by Duncan Murdoch, solving the
function-locating problem is best done by a method or methods that
automatically accommodate the growing and changing set of contributed
packages on CRAN. Why not, as previously has been
Dear list member,
this thread as well as the first one started by Philippe about the
usefulness of a GUI is interesting and overwhelming alike. IMHO, it
wittnesses the greatness and superiority of R compared to other statistical
programming environments and programs: the core team and all people
costs of GPL software?
John Fox wrote:
[...] (sorry, this is long mail, and I want to comment only
details)
By the way, if there were something I could wish for here
it would be
a slightly broader set of Tk widgets to be included with the Tcl/Tk
that installs with R for Windows
Dear Peter,
-Original Message-
From: Peter Dalgaard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 5:46 AM
To: John Fox
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
John Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I don't think that
it would
My very dear Prof. Dalgaard:
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Argh. Please stop poking at my guilty conscience Wrapping Tcl/Tk
extensions as R packages has been on my wish list too for some time,
...
You, of all people, should hardly have a guilty conscience about
not doing enough on R! I, and
I inadvertently directed this response to the R-Gui
list this morning. To those receiving a double
receipt, I give my apologies. My intended list was the
R list.
--- Duncan Murdoch [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 03:24:01 -0800 (PST), Michael
Grant
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
John W. Eaton wrote:
On 17-Nov-2004, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| - There is no possibility to make a commercial GUI for R (thanks to
| the GPL),
This is false. Please don't confuse commercial (Red Hat
and SuSE GNU/Linux distributions are commercial
Could I voice my support for the sixth point raised by John Fox? Many
users would find such a development to be enormously useful.
(6) As has been pointed out, e.g., by Duncan Murdoch, solving the
function-locating problem is best done by a method or methods that
automatically accommodate the
John W. Eaton wrote:
On 17-Nov-2004, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| - There is no possibility to make a commercial GUI for R (thanks to
| the GPL),
This is false. Please don't confuse commercial (Red Hat
and SuSE GNU/Linux distributions are commercial software)
with
On 17 Nov 2004, at 2:27 pm, Patrick Burns wrote:
I think Ted Harding was on the mark when he said that it is the help
system that needs enhancement. I can imagine a system that gets the
user to the right function and then helps fill in the arguments; all
of the
time pointing them towards the
On 18 Nov 2004, at 10:27 am, Tim Cutts wrote:
The R Intro PDF is good, but it would be nice if it were integrated
better, with hyperlinks to the reference documentation, or to other
parts of the introduction, for those platforms that support such
things
I should correct myself here, and note
H, interesting thread and minds will not be
changed but regarding GUIs...I thought S (aka R) was a
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE with a statistical and numerical
slant, and not a statistics application. ;O)
Certainly there is an important place for GUIs but I
believe that it is very much
Tim Cutts schrieb:
Any GUI to R could (and should) be able to store the command line
equivalent to what it has just done, to satisfy the reproducible
criterion above, but I suspect it could still lead to some pretty shoddy
work being done by careless and lazy scientists, and we get enough of
At 11/18/2004 07:01 AM Thursday, Thomas Schönhoff wrote:
To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based help-system,
focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is already there, i.e.
SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.
Hopefully I can contribute to this in
Hello,
I appreciate many comments and the various points of view, especially
because there are a couple of clear explanations why several people do not
need (or even do not want) a GUI for R!
Another part of the discussion seems to switch to the never-ending question
of what kind of GUI... which
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
John W. Eaton wrote:
On 17-Nov-2004, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| - There is no possibility to make a commercial GUI for R (thanks to
| the GPL),
This is false. Please don't confuse commercial (Red Hat
and SuSE GNU/Linux distributions
On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 03:24 -0800, Michael Grant wrote:
H, interesting thread and minds will not be
changed but regarding GUIs...I thought S (aka R) was a
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE with a statistical and numerical
slant, and not a statistics application. ;O)
From the R web site:
R is a
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Mike Prager wrote:
...
Using CLI software, an infrequent user has trouble remembering the known
functions needed and trouble finding new ones (especially as that user gets
older). What might help is an added help facility more oriented towards
tasks, rather than
On 17-Nov-04 Patrick Burns wrote:
[...]
Perhaps an overly harsh summary of some of Ted Harding's
statements is: You can make a truck easier to get into
by taking off the wheels, but that doesn't make it more useful.
Yes, perhaps overly harsh ... but if you had said instead
by deflating the
Mike Prager wrote:
At 11/18/2004 07:01 AM Thursday, Thomas Schönhoff wrote:
To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based
help-system, focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is
already there, i.e. SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.
Hopefully I can
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
...
...
I second all of that. What you are describing Mike could be done with
a community-maintained wiki, with easy to add hyperlinks to other sites.
There is a wiki at http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl but it
doesn't seem to get
From: David Forrest
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Mike Prager wrote:
...
Using CLI software, an infrequent user has trouble
remembering the known
functions needed and trouble finding new ones (especially
as that user gets
older). What might help is an added help facility more
oriented
The author of the article says nothing about the large
number of hours and weeks that he surely spent learning
S-plus!
There should be attention to the costs that arise from a wrong
or inappropriate analysis, perhaps because the software that
is in use makes it difficult to do anything better,
Dear list members,
This has been a stimulating discussion, now spread over three lists.
Although I'd like to address issues that have been raised on all three
lists, I expect that more or less everyone reads r-help, so I'm just posting
these comments there.
(1) As everyone else, I've had
Hello,
In the latest 'Scientific Computing World' magazine (issue 78, p. 22), there
is a review on free statistical software by Felix Grant (doesn't have to
pay good money to obtain good statistics software). As far as I know, this
is the first time that R is even mentioned in this magazine,
So, is this analysis correct: are there hidden costs for free
software like R in the time required to learn it? At least
currently, for the people I know (biologists, ecologists,
oceanographers, ...), this is perfectly true. This is even an
insurmountable barrier for many of them I know, and
Dear Phillippe,
Very interesting. The URL of the article is
http://www.scientific-computing.com/scwsepoct04free_statistics.html.
Best regards,
Jan Smit
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Hello,
In the latest 'Scientific Computing World' magazine (issue 78, p. 22), there
is a review on free statistical
On 17-Nov-04 Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Hello,
In the latest 'Scientific Computing World' magazine
(issue 78, p. 22), there is a review on free statistical
software by Felix Grant (doesn't have to pay good money
to obtain good statistics software). As far as I know,
this is the first time
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
I would be interested by your impressions and ideas on this topic.
I have found that user friendly packages make a lot of assumptions and
take a lot of decisions for the user. This makes things easy, but you do
not really know what is going on, and I'd say this is a
On 11/17/04 12:34, Ted Harding wrote:
This, though, still fails for information in packages which
you have not installed. Perhaps I'm about to reveal my own
culpable ignorance here, but I'm not aware of a full R info
package which would be installed as part of R-base, being
a database of info
I'm a big advocate -- perhaps even fanatic -- of making R easier for
novices in order to spread its use, but I'm not convinced that a GUI
(at least in the traditional form) is the most valuable approach.
Perhaps an overly harsh summary of some of Ted Harding's statements
is: You can make a truck
costs of GPL software?
I'm a big advocate -- perhaps even fanatic -- of making R easier for
novices in order to spread its use, but I'm not convinced that a GUI
(at least in the traditional form) is the most valuable approach.
Perhaps an overly harsh summary of some of Ted Harding's statements
learning
process. - George E. P. Box
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Burns
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 6:28 AM
To: Jan P. Smit
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Philippe Grosjean;
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs
This has been an interesting discussion. I make the following comment with
hesitation, since I have neither the time nor the ability to implement it
myself.
Using CLI software, an infrequent user has trouble remembering the known
functions needed and trouble finding new ones (especially as
Thank you all (+ a couple of offline comments) on this topic.
To summarize your comments:
- Hidden costs, may be better called indirect costs are not so easy to
calculate. In the cited paper
http://www.scientific-computing.com/scwsepoct04free_statistics.html, there
is an interesting advice from a
Hopefully my experience with R may add something to this discussion.
I majored in computer science in 1983, with minors in mathematics and
statistics. As this was in the days when computers were largely big
centralised boxes with remote terminals, I didn't get to use computers
for stats while I
Patrick Burns wrote:
I'm a big advocate -- perhaps even fanatic -- of making R easier for
novices in order to spread its use, but I'm not convinced that a GUI
(at least in the traditional form) is the most valuable approach.
Perhaps an overly harsh summary of some of Ted Harding's statements
is:
Hi All,
GRETL, a Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library is
open-source, cross-platform, multi-language and fully GUI based. The
website is http://gretl.sourceforge.net/ This is NOT a personal plug,
simply posted to show what can be done.
Andrew
Background: I'm a Computer Science lecturer, and I read the blue book cover
to cover before ever setting finger to keyboard with R.
Observation: I really only use R for very simple things, but there's
practically *nothing* I've done with R since installing it could have
been done via menus. I
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