[R] mclust

[Sarah Goslee]

Thank you for the suggestions. I've generally relied on task views to
simplify package installation, and not paid much attention to other
options.

I also see that mclust does notify the user when loaded:
> library(mclust)

by using mclust, invoked on its own or through another package,
you accept the license agreement in the mclust LICENSE file
and at http://www.stat.washington.edu/mclust/license.txt

Time to uninstall, as that's so much easier than trying to justify
government research as "academic" to my administration and
theirs.

Sarah

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Sarah Goslee wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> This is why we have filters="license/FOSS" in available.packages(), and
> files etc/licensed.site and .R/licensed (see ?library).  You can easily set
> your R up to never install not-claimed-to-be-FOSS packages.
>
> (The history of mclust is rather unfortunate: the license was changed long
> after it was accepted by CRAN, and by then it had several packages depending
> on it.)
>
> It does seem appropriate that the task views highlight the restrictive
> license, so I've Cc:ed the maintainers.
>


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