Non-GPL packages for R

Hi,
Prof. John C Nash wrote:
The responses to my posting yesterday seem to indicate more consensus
than I expected:
Umm, I had thought that it was well established that responders need 
not represent the population being surveyed.  I doubt that there is 
consensus at the level you are suggesting (certainly I don't agree) and 
as Peter indicates below the issue is: what is maintainable with the 
resources we have, not what is the best solution given unlimited resources.

   Personally, I would like to see something that was a bit easier to 
deal with programmatically that indicated when a package was GPL (or 
Open source actually) compatible and when it is not.  This could then be 
used to write a decent function to identify suspect packages so that 
users would know when they should be concerned.

   It is also the case that things are not so simple, as dependencies 
can make a package unusable even if it is itself GPL-compatible.  This 
also makes the notion of some simple split into free and non-free (or 
what ever split you want) less trivial than is being suggested.

   Robert
1) CRAN should be restricted to GPL-equivalent licensed packages
GPL-_compatible_ would be the word. However, this is not what has been
done in the past. There are packages with "non-commercial use" licences,
and the survival package was among them for quite a while. As far as I
know, the CRAN policy has been to ensure only that redistribution is
legal and that whatever license is used is visible to the user. People
who have responded on the list do not necessarily speak for CRAN. In the
final analysis, the maintainers must decide what is maintainable.

The problem with Rdonlp2 seems to have been that the interface packages
claimed to be LGPL2 without the main copyright holder's consent (and it
seems that he cannot grant consent for reasons of TU-Darmstadt
policies). It is hard to safeguard agaist that sort of thing. CRAN
maintainers must assume that legalities have been cleared and accept the
license in good faith.

(Even within the Free Software world there are current issues with,
e.g., incompatibilities between GPL v.2 and v.3, and also with the
Eclipse license. Don't get me started...)

2) r-forge could be left "buyer beware" using DESCRIPTION information
3) We may want a specific repository for restricted packages (RANC?)

How to proceed? A short search on Rseek did not turn up a chain of
command for CRAN.

I'm prepared to help out with documentation etc. to move changes
forward. They are not, in my opinion, likely to cause a lot of trouble
for most users, and should simplify things over time.

JN

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Non-GPL packages for R

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