[Rd] Non-GPL packages for R

[rudjer]

Comrades,

When talk turns to the purity of the revolution, and purge of packages then
the guillotine can't be far behind.  We all remember Lenin berating the
"renegade Kautsky" for his "pragmatism," and we know where that led...

So let me put in a good word for pragmatism, and incidentally for saving one
of my 
own packages, SparseM, and perhaps eventually my neck.  Last week Kurt asked
me to look into a SparseM licensing quirk based on an inquiry from the
Fedora
folks.  SparseM is GPL except for one routine cholesky.f written at Oakridge
Lab by E. Ng and B. Peyton.  Our version of the code was redistributed in
the
package PCx which was copywrited by the U. of Chicago, who specified that
commercial users should contact someone at Argonne National Lab.  Since the
beginning we have retained this language in the License file of SparseM,
even
though the code in question was not actually developed as a part of PCx.

I contacted one of the original PCx developers who responded as follows:

	The routine you mention was distributed with PCx but not part 
	of it as you see from the legalese and not covered by the PCx 
	copyright.  I tried to interest the authors of that code 
	in legal issues in around 1997 but could not get them 
	motivated (frankly I also can't get too interested).

To which I heartily concurred.  If someone who is worried about getting sued
would like to dig into this can of worms, then fine.  But life is too short
for the rest of us.  This is quite a murky business, we shouldn't create 
incentives to make it murkier by covering up relevant language on licensing.
But surely we can also all agree that CRAN has been a fantastic success, and
adding new constraints on its operation is ill-advised.

Roger


url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoenker at uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Urbana, IL 61801

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