Please follow up and make sure R/BioC authors really understand the issue (Was: Usage of locfit is questionable due to its non-free license)
Hi folks,
I consider my last mail a serious issue. I tried to demonstrate that
the usage of locfit code on CRAN is illegal since the license was
stripped (which is forbidden according to the license text). Since I've
got no answer from any of the R / BioC authors and I'm stumbling upon
more and more use cases of locfit in BioConductor packages I'd be really
happy if somebody else would nag again and try to explain with other
words / other communication channels.
Thank you
Andreas.
On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 08:45:50AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as you can see in the longish discussion on the "Intend to Package"
> claim to package locfit for Debian[1] the license of locfit is
> problematic. I'm more and more stumbling upon use cases of locfit from
> CRAN (recently in DESeq - thus the author Simon Anders is explicitly
> CCed) but also in edgeR and lots of other frequently used BioConductor
> packages.
>
> The license for locfit on CRAN[2] is
> "GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]"
> but this is wrong. Most parts of the code in src/*.c are licensed under
> the following terms:
>
>
>
> ABOUT ALGORITHMS:
> The Locfit implementation has been designed largely from the point
> of view of generality: to provide a set of functions that can be
> used for as wide a range of local fitting problems as possible.
> It is not intended to be the fastest or most efficient implementation
> possible. In addition to generality, the code in many places makes
> extensive trade-offs made between speed and numerical accuracy (some
> of which can be controlled through optional arguments). Many of Locfit's
> options will only be used in a small fraction of cases; for other cases,
> they add to the cost of overhead (an obvious example is multi-dimensional
> fitting: when used in 1-d, many loops reduce to for(i=0;i<1;i++)).
> Additionally, the user interfaces (i.e. the R and S-Plus code) add
> significantly to the computational overhead. For these reasons, the
> Locfit code, as distributed, should not, and can not, be used to
> derive meaningful benchmarks, either for the speed or accuracy of algorithms.
> Anyone wishing to use Locfit in any kind of comparative benchmark
> study must contact and obtain permission from the Author.
> .
> COPYRIGHT:
> .
> Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories.
> SCB code is
> Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Jiayang Sun.
> .
> Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
> purpose (with the exceptions noted in `About Algorithms' above)
> without fee is hereby granted, and provided that this entire notice is
> included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or
> modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting
> documentation for such software.
> .
> THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
> WARRANTY. IN PARTICULAR, NEITHER THE AUTHOR NOR LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
> MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE
> MERCHANTABILITY OF THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
>
>
> Fedora came to the same conclusion when discussing the usage of locfit
> in cufflinks[3] that locfit is a show stopper for Free Software.
>
>
> The locfit code on CRAN is not including a copy of the text above and
> thus is violating the license. Moreover the clause "should not, and
> can not, be used to derive meaningful benchmarks" makes the code non-free
> since it adds a usage restriction.
>
> The Debian Med team repeatedly tried to contact upstream authors of
> locfit but failed. All seem to have vanished and my mal to Bell Labs
> remained unanswered (seems free software is not important enough for
> them).
>
> The conclusion is: Do not use locfit in Free Software. Specifically do
> not use it by breaking the license conditions and leave out the
> licensing text from upstream. Please also help to find upstream authors
> to discuss more constructive licensing terms.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Andreas.
>
>
> [1] https://bugs.debian.org/731599
> [2] https://cran.r-project.org/package=locfit
> [3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=694998
>
> --
> http://fam-tille.de
>
>
--
http://fam-tille.de
Reply to: