[R-SIG-Finance] Spread discovery and backtester code

[Jeffrey Ryan]

My apologies for starting this.

I didn't mean to imply that Chris was intending to do anything wrong.  In
fact, from a technical GPL perspective, I don't really care too much.  My
focus, and my immediate reaction was for one reason only, discourage
future use of the list to distribute opaque code.  Binaries, passwords,
etc are that - no question about it.

Chris has done a great job in responding to my somewhat less than friendly
initial reply, in terms of passing along more details as well as
explaining his position, and fixing some of the issues that weren't so
clear at the start.

The point of this list, community, et al, is open source finance, within
an R context.  It seems (now) that that is exactly what Chris is doing.
For that, I want to chime in with the others and say thanks for making the
effort in sharing your code and ideas here, and I think many would be
willing to help in the process of getting it into more hands and in front
of more eyeballs.

Jeff

On 5/22/12 10:47 AM, "soren wilkening" <me at censix.com> wrote:

>I have not looked at chris's code in detail, but I downloaded the .zip and
>there was no password protection and the R package it contains  consists
>of
>a dll (his source i would presume, but not shared here) which has been
>wrapped up in R functions.
>
>Lets assume for a moment that the sourcecode on which the dll is based is
>completely Chris's brainchild and work. In that case, wrapping it up in R
>and making it available here, or anwhere else, is certainly NOT a
>violation
>of GPL, because the dll is (assumption) not a *derivative* work of a GPL
>product (xts, other packages, C source that is GPL, etc...) but his own.
>In
>that sense, i don't understand the rather frosty reception.
>
>However, as has also been pointed out, distributing binary version of
>something is not going to earn anyone any kudos in an open source
>community.
>as simple as that.
>
>Now if my assumption is wrong and the dll is indeed a *derivative* work of
>something that itself is licensed under GPL, then and only then this whole
>thing would be problematic and violate GPL. But the easiest fix would be
>to
>include the dll's source in the package and voila! you are good to go.
>
>The author would know best ...
>
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