Re: [R-gui] RE: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
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 software) with proprietary. jwe Ooops! Sorry, and thank you for correcting me. I mean proprietary, of course. Best, Philippe Grosjean This thread has gone to be centered around the GUI of R and what it is good and bad. However, is the above statement correct? To me it seems like there is a fully working R-proxy dll for windows and other ways to interface against R that only binds to LGPL components. You can build completely proprietary packages and front-ends to R without having to make sources available, as long as you distribute changes to R itself as source. In my opinion anyone can be to R what S+ is to S. Can any developer comment on this? Best regards, David __ [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
RE: [R-gui] RE: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
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 proprietary. jwe Ooops! Sorry, and thank you for correcting me. I mean proprietary, of course. Best, Philippe Grosjean __ [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
RE: [R-gui] Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
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 will never be answered, because there is not one best GUI, and it also depends on the use (both the application and the user). It's a long time I hesitate to propose in R-SIG-GUI + the R GUI projects web site to place a description for one or several prototype GUI(s) we would like for R, with the intention to include all the good ideas everybody has in this list. I never did that, because I am pretty sure it is useless! Now, I feel that one guy, with a clear view of what he wants, a lot of free time, a lot of energy, and some decent skills in programming, is actually required to make real what he has in his head! Indeed, it is such a huge work that several people are required! Here are the topics currently developed (sorry if I don't cite Bioconductor stuff: I don't know it): - Most of the low-level work is done, I think, like interface with graphical toolkits: tcltk by Peter Dalgaard, of course, but many others (Gtk, wxPython, ...), a better control of Rgui under Windows (ongoing, Duncan Murdoch), ESS, ... All this is already available, even if one could always argue that it is not optimal in some respects. - A better console (multiple-lines editing, syntax coloring, code tip presenting the syntax of a function when you type it, contextual completion list, ...). This is ongoing project in both JGR and SciViews-R. - A better table editor: RKward team. - A classical menus/dialog box approach: John Fox's R commander, - An object explorer: JGR, RKward, SciViews-R, experimental functions in R, - A plug-in approach, that is, a piece of code that brings a GUI for a targeted analysis and builds R code for you: RKward team, but also some functions in svDialogs (part of the SciViews bundle, R GUI API), - Interactive documents mixing formatted text, graphs, etc... with R input/output: Rpad, Sweave (not interactive), and some other, - Rich-formatted output of R objects (in/out, views, reporting,...): Eric Lecoutre's R2HTML + SciViews-R, - Code editor with interaction with R: Tinn-R, WinEdt, Emacs, and many others, - IDE (humm, some code editors are not so far away from an IDE, but there is still some lack here), - A R GUI API: SciViews. I hope all these projects will continue, will mature, and their developers will ultimately realize that they provide complementary pieces of a giant puzzle and start to work together. This is when it will become most exciting! I hope also that it will result in an original GUI that keeps most of the spirit of R, that is, not a simplified pointclick UI, leading to meaningless analyses by lazy people, but a real tool whose goal is to make R easier and faster to learn for beginner, and pretty usable for occasional users. May be, I am just a dreamer, but all I read in this discussion reinforce my conviction that an **innovative** GUI would be a good addition to R: most criticisms clearly relate to the kind of inflexible GUI, with a forest of menus and submenus, and other bad things one could find. I never, and will never advocate for such a GUI! For sure, the alternate GUI will only support you in writing R code, and will deliver plenty of help to achieve this goal. I think it is possible... with enough people collaborating in a common project! I think the later point is really the problem: not enough people, too many projects! Is it a consequence of the way R is developed (GPL)? Well, I think so, but only partly. It is also the consequence of ego (everybody wants to be the leader of his own project), and a lack of communication (R-SIG-GUI is not what one would call an active list!) Or, may be, a good GUI for R is a fuzzy target and it is not possible to cristallize enough power around a common goal: to reach it! Anyway, despite R GUI projects are progressing very slowly, I think only when we would have a good GUI available for R, we would be able to evaluate if there are really hidden costs in R, as Felix Grant suggests in his paper. Best regards and thank you all for your comments and suggestions. Philippe Grosjean __ [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
RE: [R-gui] RE: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
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 are commercial software) with proprietary. jwe Ooops! Sorry, and thank you for correcting me. I mean proprietary, of course. Best, And it isn't obvious that it is true even if you mean proprietary. A GUI that ran R just by sending commands to stdin and getting results from stdout could clearly be proprietary without violating the GPL. The question of exactly what level of closer integration is allowed would get complicated and I won't speculate. -thomas __ [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
Re: [R-gui] Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
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: You can make a truck easier to get into by taking off the wheels, but that doesn't make it more useful. In terms of GUIs, I think what R should focus on is the ability for user's to make their own specialized GUI. So that a knowledgeable programmer at an installation can create a system that is easy for unsophisticated users for the limited number of tasks that are to be done. The ultimate users may not even need to know that R exists. 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 command line rather than away from it. The author of the referenced article highlighted some hidden costs of R, but did not highlight the hidden benefits (because they were hidden from him). A big benefit of R is all of the bugs that aren't in it (which may or may not be due to its free status). Patrick Burns Burns Statistics [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and A Guide for the Unwilling S User) Jan P. Smit wrote: 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 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, given that it usually discuss commercial products. [ ...] I really agree with you Patrick. To me the keys are having better help search capabilities, linking help files to case studies or at least detailed examples, having a navigator by keywords (a rudimentary one is at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/s/finder/finder.html), having a great library of examples keyed by statistical goals (a la BUGS examples guides), and having a menu-driven skeleton code generator that gives beginners a starting script to edit to use their variable names, etc. Also I think we need a discussion board that has a better memory for new users, like some of the user forums currently on the web, or using a wiki. Frank -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University __ [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
