[R] How many R packages are not free?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Sat, Oct 02, 2010 at 10:38:22AM -0700, Spencer Graves wrote:
>        Is there anything on CRAN that is NOT free?  

Lots. 

Also notice that 'free' means more than redistribution.  

> I assumed that CRAN had a policy of not accepting anything that could not be freely  

That's the trouble with assumptions.

> 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".

Take 

   http://debian.cran.r-project.org/banned_packages.html

as a first start. It;s out of date as cran2deb is being rebuilt but
there are all sorts of nastinesses.  Some UW packages (mclust et al)
have non-free licenses that are academic-only (and hence discriminate
on use making them non-free). KU Leuven in Belgium and CSIRO in
Australia prohibit commercial use ...  Lots of bad examples.  

But given a universe of 2500+ packages, not entirely surprising that some differ.

(The web page comingles unsuitable licenses with other reasons for not
building packages such as dependency of external libraries or BioC.)

Dirk

>
>
>       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]]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide  
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> -- 
> Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
> President and Chief Operating Officer
> Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
> 751 Emerson Ct.
> San José, CA 95126
> ph:  408-655-4567
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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.

-- 
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