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clipping polygons, overlaying big polygon on polygons

On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Markus Loecher wrote:

            
Yes, but sadly this does not solve the problem if you are going to use the 
output beyond hobby or education, as PBSmapping also uses the GPC code. 
Attempts were made to persuade the author to license his code in a more 
helpful way, but he has left his employing university, and they have 
retained the rights to his software.

Although the PBSmapping maintainers claim to have permission to ship GPC 
under GPL, I would try to stay as far away from it as possible. Once code 
using it gets into the workflow, it is really hard to remove. The spatstat 
maintainers are working hard to make users aware of the problems, which 
will not go away, I'm afraid.

If you'd like to try rgeos, please checkout or download from R-Forge. The 
gpc.poly-shadowing classes and methods now provide an intersection 
operation. Kicking the GPC habit is hard, but must be done, otherwise we 
risk spreading downstream dependencies.

Before long CRAN may have colour-coded license dependencies, and 
organisations can already block the installation of CRAN packages that 
have non-free (as in speech) licenses or that depend upstream on non-free 
packages. The akima package is another worry, but has a much clearer 
license that does permit research under noncommercial use. GPC only 
permits "non-commercial use of GPC (for example: private / hobbyist / 
education)" while "commercial research" requires a commercial use license. 
Any contract research could fall under "commercial research", because it 
generates income.

I would be very grateful for help with rgeos ...

Roger