[R-sig-Geo] status of gpclib licence

[Adrian.Baddeley at csiro.au]

Nicholas Lewin-Koh and others have asked about the licence for the R package 'gpclib'. This is based on the C library 'gpclib' by Alan Murtagh which has a non-GPL licence.

Recently I contacted the licence holders for the C library, with a formal request that the licence be changed to GPL. After contacting Alan Murtagh they replied that it has been decided, definitively, not to alter the licence.

Hence we are currently looking for a FOSS replacement for gpclib. Any volunteers?

In the meantime, packages that depend on gpclib could use the following strategy that we have adopted for 'spatstat'. The 'spatstat' package previously 'Depend'ed on gpclib. I have reorganised spatstat so that it only 'Suggests' gpclib, and the gpclib-dependent code can be enabled or disabled using a flag, spatstat.options("gpclib") which is initialised to FALSE. If you are an academic or non-profit, set spatstat.options(gpclib=TRUE). If you're commercial, leave it as FALSE and have a nice day...

Adrian Baddeley