[Rd] License of Port3 library for R

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Pin Tian Ng<Pin.Ng at nau.edu> wrote:
>      I developed some code that called subroutines from the Port3 Library
> (http://www-out.bell-labs.com/project/PORT/).  I¹m thinking about making it
> available as an R package.  But I¹m not sure if their NON-EXCLUSIVE SOURCE
> CODE LICENSE AGREEMENT (
> http://www-out.bell-labs.com/topic/swdist/licenses/nesource.txt ) permits
> this.

 It looks like a single-user, no-redistribution, no copying license.
You could write a package that calls Port3 subroutines, but you
couldn't distribute Port3 source or binaries with it - users would
have to go get it themselves, and then probably they'd have to compile
it.

 It seems though that some of Port3 is derived from Public Domain
sources - see here:

http://www-out.bell-labs.com/project/PORT/doc/README

 and you could include those files.

> I tried contacting the contact person listed on the website.  Not
> surprisingly, the recipient doesn't exist at Lucent anymore.  Any advice on
> this will be appreciated.

 I'd recommend you rewrite your code to call subroutines from freely
available and redistributable code libraries - in many cases you can
use internal R subroutines, or there's the GSL:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

Barry