The hidden costs of GPL software?
Dear Peter,
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Dalgaard [mailto:p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk] Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 5:46 AM To: John Fox Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software? "John Fox" <jfox at mcmaster.ca> 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 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.
I've thought about remembering dialog values, but I guess so far I've been too lazy to do it or, to put a better construction on it, too distracted by other things. It shouldn't be hard to do -- just a matter of maintaining a data base of previous entries that are flushed when the active data set changes. Actually, the linear-model and generalized-linear-model dialogs already do this. I'd be interested in the other little niggles as well.
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 this set creates installation
obstacles for
lower-level users.
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, with tktable as the obvious first candidate. (It's not just on Windows; the default Unix/Linux installs of Tcl/Tk tend to be pretty minimal too. On Windows we have this instructive twist on the BSD/GPL debacle, that ActiveState made a very nice Tcl/Tk distribution with all sorts of "batteries included", but we cannot bundle it with R as they are restricting redistribution.)
I certainly don't want to press this issue, since I'm grateful for what you've already done (and it's surprising how much mileage one can get from the basic widget set). I see this as primarily a Windows problem because users of other computing platforms (possibly with the exception of some Mac users) tend to be more sophisticated about installing software. Regards, John
-- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907