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mclust

3 messages · Sarah Goslee, Brian Ripley

Sarah Goslee
# 
While looking at someone's question on this list led me to the mclust
package, and from there to its license.

Excerpts:

Except for strict academic use, use of MCLUST (by itself or through other
packages) requires payment of an annual license fee and completion of a
license agreement found at the following URL:
http://depts.washington.edu/ventures/UW_Technology/Express_Licenses/mclust.php

1. the MCLUST software, including any modifications you may have made to it,
   remains at your Institution and is not published, distributed, or
   otherwise transferred or made available in whole or in part, modified or
   unmodified, to other than Institution employees and/or students under your
   direct supervision;

Someone installing mclust using install.packages() might never see
this information,
and in fact mclust is in the Multivariate task view so it's installed
on my computers.
I don't believe I've ever used it, which is a good thing since I'm not
a strict academic!

Is there any way to flag packages like this, with restrictive or
unusual licenses. I tend
to assume that anything on CRAN is GPL and not worry about it, but
obviously that's
untrue.

I'd ask if anyone has completed the form and paid the licensing fee,
but I don't want
anyone to incriminate themselves.

And I believe I'll be deleting the package from my systems.

Sarah
Brian Ripley
#
On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Sarah Goslee wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
This is why we have filters="license/FOSS" in available.packages(), 
and files etc/licensed.site and .R/licensed (see ?library).  You can 
easily set your R up to never install not-claimed-to-be-FOSS packages.

(The history of mclust is rather unfortunate: the license was changed 
long after it was accepted by CRAN, and by then it had several 
packages depending on it.)

It does seem appropriate that the task views highlight the restrictive 
license, so I've Cc:ed the maintainers.

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Sarah Goslee
    

    

      
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Thank you for the suggestions. I've generally relied on task views to
simplify package installation, and not paid much attention to other
options.

I also see that mclust does notify the user when loaded:

            

      
      
      
    

        
by using mclust, invoked on its own or through another package,
you accept the license agreement in the mclust LICENSE file
and at http://www.stat.washington.edu/mclust/license.txt

Time to uninstall, as that's so much easier than trying to justify
government research as "academic" to my administration and
theirs.

Sarah

        
On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote: