[R] The hidden costs of GPL software?

Philippe Grosjean phgrosjean at sciviews.org
Fri Nov 19 12:03:11 CET 2004


Peter,

You don't need the ActiveState Tcl distribution to add extensions. If you
compile extensions yourself (and these extensions have a compatible
license), then you have no problems... (well, almost! You must make sure
those extensions compile correctly on all supproted platforms). This is
exactly what I do in the tcltk2 package.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Peter Dalgaard
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 11:46 AM
> To: John Fox
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
> 
> "John Fox" <jfox at mcmaster.ca> writes:
> 
> > I don't think that
> > it would be hard (although it would be time-consuming) to produce a 
> > much broader extension, but the result (in my opinion) would be as 
> > dubiously useful as the GUIs for SAS or S-PLUS.
> 
> Strategically, that might actually be a valid (and valiant) 
> design goal! From my limited experience with Rcmdr and SAS 
> Analyst, I'd say that Rcmdr is almost there, just a few 
> little niggles like not remembering values from the last time 
> a form was filled in.
> 
> > By the way, if there were something I
> > could wish for here it would be a slightly broader set of 
> Tk widgets 
> > to be included with the Tcl/Tk that installs with R for 
> Windows, since 
> > using widgets outside of this set creates installation 
> obstacles for 
> > lower-level users.
> 
> Argh. Please stop poking at my guilty conscience.... Wrapping 
> Tcl/Tk extensions as R packages has been on my wish list too 
> for some time, with tktable as the obvious first candidate. 
> (It's not just on Windows; the default Unix/Linux installs of 
> Tcl/Tk tend to be pretty minimal too. On Windows we have this 
> instructive twist on the BSD/GPL debacle, that ActiveState 
> made a very nice Tcl/Tk distribution with all sorts of 
> "batteries included", but we cannot bundle it with R as they 
> are restricting redistribution.)
> 
> 
> -- 
>    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
>   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
>  (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: 
> (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: 
> (+45) 35327907
> 
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