[Rd] Porting R example datasets to GNU Octave

[Andrew Janke]

On 5/6/19 7:47 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
> On 5 May 2019 at 10:47, Andrew Janke wrote:
> | I'm interested in porting the R example datasets package to GNU Octave
> | and Matlab. Would you have objections to my doing so?
>
> You don't even have to ask...
>
> [...]
>
> | Since R's datasets package is GPL, I think I'd be within my rights to
> | just do this. But I wanted to ask first, to make sure I didn't ruffle
> | any feathers. I would include documentation indicating that R is the
> | original source (well, intermediate source) for these datasets, and have
> | links pointing back to R's documentation.
>
> That is the right way to do that. Respect both copyright (citing and
> referencing source) and licensing (by picking a license compatible
> with GPL 2
> or later; many of us just prefer to stick to GPL which Octave uses too).
>
> Dirk, in no way speaking for R Core but just handing out his $0.02

Thanks Dirk!

I've ported many of the datasets over to Octave code in my "Tablicious"
project.

To preserve credit, I've:
- propagated the "Copyright (C) 1995-2007 R Core Team" copyright
statement to the copyright headers in all the individual files for the
Octave code, since GNU Octave does per-file copyright headers
- added a "This is based on the <name> dataset from R's datasets
package" comment to each individual dataset source file
- added a section to the user manual mentioning that they came from R:
https://apjanke.github.io/octave-tablicious/doc/tablicious.html#Data-Sets-from-R

My project is GPL3+, so it's license compatible.

If you're curious to see how it turned out, the source is at
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious under
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious/tree/master/inst/%2Boctave/%2Binternal/%2Bdatasets
and
https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious/tree/master/inst/%2Boctave/%2Bexamples/%2Binternal/%2Bdatasets.

R seems to have an edge on Octave in terms of plotting capabilities, so
many of the code examples in my port are just "TODO: Port this plot type
to Octave".

Cheers,
Andrew