[R] mclust

Sarah Goslee sarah.goslee at gmail.com
Fri Dec 9 13:29:59 CET 2011


While looking at someone's question on this list led me to the mclust
package, and from there to its license.

Excerpts:

Except for strict academic use, use of MCLUST (by itself or through other
packages) requires payment of an annual license fee and completion of a
license agreement found at the following URL:
http://depts.washington.edu/ventures/UW_Technology/Express_Licenses/mclust.php

1. the MCLUST software, including any modifications you may have made to it,
   remains at your Institution and is not published, distributed, or
   otherwise transferred or made available in whole or in part, modified or
   unmodified, to other than Institution employees and/or students under your
   direct supervision;

Someone installing mclust using install.packages() might never see
this information,
and in fact mclust is in the Multivariate task view so it's installed
on my computers.
I don't believe I've ever used it, which is a good thing since I'm not
a strict academic!

Is there any way to flag packages like this, with restrictive or
unusual licenses. I tend
to assume that anything on CRAN is GPL and not worry about it, but
obviously that's
untrue.

I'd ask if anyone has completed the form and paid the licensing fee,
but I don't want
anyone to incriminate themselves.

And I believe I'll be deleting the package from my systems.

Sarah

-- 
Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org



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