The hidden costs of GPL software?

-----Original Message-----
From: Philippe Grosjean [mailto:phgrosjean at sciviews.org] 
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 3:29 AM
To: 'John Fox'; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: RE: [R] The hidden 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, since using widgets 

outside of this 

set creates installation obstacles for lower-level users.

Then, take a look at the tcltk2 package in the SciViews 
bundle (probably, in the next version, I will take it out of 
the bundle). You have there tile (themable widgets with 
notebook tabs, progress bar, and many more... and very soon 
combo boxes and lists/trees). You have also the famous 
tkTable, and a separate combobox and a tree, and a support 
for tooltips everywhere...
Just propose if you need more! All this runs under Windows, 
but I still got problems to compile it under other platforms.

I doubt that many list
members would look favourably on the statistical-methods "decision 
tree" in MicrOsiris, for example. One solution is to include PDF 
"manuals" with packages. I've done this, for example, with 

my effects 

and Rcmdr packages.
The introductory manual supplied with Thomas Lumley's 

survey package 

is another, similar example. Maybe there's a better way of 

integrating 

such non-vignette manuals with the help system -- something like 
help(manual=package).

I tend to have the same opinion than John (although I thing 
that both a good manual, and a better online help could be 
beneficial): a PDF manual is much more readable than a wiki! 
Why not to propose PDF manuals in the \doc section of CRAN 
which have a GNU Free Documentation License 
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), so that the manual 
could be progressively enhanced by many authors?

Best,

Philippe Grosjean