[R] How many R packages are not free?

[Uwe Ligges]

On 02.10.2010 19:38, Spencer Graves wrote:
>   Is there anything on CRAN that is NOT free?

Oh dear, dangerous terrain ....

Yes, there are some non-free packages on CRAN according to the 
terminology used by the Free Software Foundation. One example was 
already given in the original question: "mclust". Just read its license 
file.

Best wishes,
Uwe




> I assumed that CRAN had a
> policy of not accepting anything that could not be freely distributed,
> but I could not find any such statement in a quick search. The code by
> Uwe identified 52 packages with "file LICENCE" or "file LICENSE", plus
> others with combinations of something like GPL with "file LICENCE" or
> "file LICENSE".
>
>
> Thanks,
> Spencer
>
>
> On 10/2/2010 9:42 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 01.10.2010 23:58, Paul Miller wrote:
>>> Hello Everyone,
>>>
>>> Just finished reading A Handbook of Statistical Analyses using R by
>>> Everitt and Hothorn. I'll begin by saying that I quite liked the
>>> book. It's both little and mighty in the sense that it's very compact
>>> but contains a tremendous amount of useful material.
>>>
>>> The last chapter of the book deals with cluster analysis. There's a
>>> package used in this chapter (I believe that it's called mclust) that
>>> charges an annual fee to non-academics. I did a little digging and
>>> found out that the annual cost for some one like me would be $100 but
>>> it would cost more for people in large companies. This isn't exactly
>>> outrageous but got me to wondering how many other packages might not
>>> be free. I searched online but didn't find much.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any information about this?
>>
>> Are you talking about CRAN packages?
>> If so, looking into the license information of the repository shows
>> which have standard licenses such as GPL and which licenses are
>> special. Just take a look, e.g. starting with
>>
>> download.file("http://cran.R-project.org/web/packages/packages.rds",
>> "packages.rds", mode="wb")
>> x <- .readRDS("packages.rds")
>> x <- x[!duplicated(x[,1]),]
>> table(x[,"License"])
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Uwe Ligges
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
>>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>