[R] How many R packages are not free?

[Spencer Graves]

  Thanks.  Spencer

On 10/2/2010 10:51 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 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 It;s out of date as cran2deb is being rebuilt but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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>> ______________________________________________
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