[R] How many R packages are not free?

Spencer Graves spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com
Sat Oct 2 19:38:22 CEST 2010


        Is there anything on CRAN that is NOT free?  I assumed that CRAN 
had a policy of not accepting anything that could not be freely 
distributed, but I could not find any such statement in a quick search.  
The code by Uwe identified 52 packages with "file LICENCE" or "file 
LICENSE", plus others with combinations of something like GPL with "file 
LICENCE" or "file LICENSE".


       Thanks,
       Spencer


On 10/2/2010 9:42 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
> On 01.10.2010 23:58, Paul Miller wrote:
>> Hello Everyone,
>>
>> Just finished reading A Handbook of Statistical Analyses using R by 
>> Everitt and Hothorn. I'll begin by saying that I quite liked the 
>> book. It's both little and mighty in the sense that it's very compact 
>> but contains a tremendous amount of useful material.
>>
>> The last chapter of the book deals with cluster analysis.  There's a 
>> package used in this chapter (I believe that it's called mclust) that 
>> charges an annual fee to non-academics. I did a little digging and 
>> found out that the annual cost for some one like me would be $100 but 
>> it would cost more for people in large companies. This isn't exactly 
>> outrageous but got me to wondering how many other packages might not 
>> be free. I searched online but didn't find much.
>>
>> Does anyone have any information about this?
>
> Are you talking about CRAN packages?
> If so, looking into the license information of the repository shows 
> which have standard licenses such as GPL and which licenses are 
> special. Just take a look, e.g. starting with
>
> download.file("http://cran.R-project.org/web/packages/packages.rds", 
> "packages.rds", mode="wb")
> x <- .readRDS("packages.rds")
> x <- x[!duplicated(x[,1]),]
> table(x[,"License"])
>
>
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>>     [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Operating Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567



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