[Rd] License status of CRAN packages

[Greg Snow]

I don't know about the legal definitions of all, but a few years back the British Medical Journal had a filler article that looked at some surveys of what people thought different words meant (you can get at the filler by going to http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7565/442 and downloading the pdf version of the article then scrolling to the end).

According to this, when people say always they could mean anywhere from 91-100% of the time and when they say never it could be 0-2% of the time.

This doesn't prove anything, but I thought it was an interesting side note to the discussion.

-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at imail.org
801.408.8111


> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Dirk Eddelbuettel
> Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 3:05 PM
> To: Gabor Grothendieck
> Cc: Friedrich Leisch; Matthew Dowle; charles blundell; r-devel at r-
> project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] License status of CRAN packages
> 
> 
> On 23 April 2009 at 16:35, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> | Of the 31 packages listed:
> |  [1] "BARD"          "BayesDA"       "CoCo"          "ConvCalendar"
> |  [5] "FAiR"          "PTAk"          "RScaLAPACK"    "Rcsdp"
> |  [9] "SDDA"          "SGP"           "alphahull"     "ash"
> | [13] "asypow"        "caMassClass"   "gpclib"        "mapproj"
> | [17] "matlab"        "mclust"        "mclust02"      "mlbench"
> | [21] "optmatch"      "rankreg"       "realized"      "rngwell19937"
> | [25] "rtiff"         "rwt"           "scagnostics"   "sgeostat"
> | [29] "spatialkernel" "tlnise"        "xgobi"
> |
> | the license fields are AGPL or GPL for 3 and specified in a separate
> | file "file LICENSE" so about 30 of 1700 < 2% are question marks.
> 
> My point is that you currently need to manually parse 'file LICENSE'.
> 
> And as I said, we did not claim that our set was exhaustive, current or
> perfect. We just can't automate anything better given the current
> framework.
> And I think we all should be able to do better in scripted approaches.
> I
> still think you're proving my point.
> 
> | To me that is not inconsistent with all or nearly all being free
> software
> 
> I doubt that "all or nearly all" would equated to "exactly all" by a
> court. You only need one bad apple to spoil the lot.
> 
> Dirk
> 
> --
> Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
> 
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