[R] How many R packages are not free?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2010, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> On 10/02/2010 07:38 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>>         Is there anything on CRAN that is NOT free?  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".
>
>
> I believe the CRAN policy is just that: Freely redistributable. "Free
> Software" usually means something else: Free usage and modification.

I am sure that is the intention, but a few packages have changed their 
licence terms since they were accepted.  'mclust' and 'optmatch' are 
two, and they are not currently 'freely redistributable'.

> One main issue is code licensed "free for non-commercial usage" or
> "academic usage", which are not Free Software. However, CRAN being a
> repository with many academic users, it does serve a purpose to
> distribute them for research purposes.  [Long discussion omitted of
> whether that sort of license was ever a good idea....]

I've not seen in this thread mention of the "Licencse/FOSS" filter and 
option 'checkPackageLicense' - see the help on available.packages() 
and options() respectively.  These do enable people to work within the 
subset of packages 'known to be Free or Open Source'.

>
>
> -- 
> Peter Dalgaard
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595