You are, of course, missing the obvious solution, which is to do nothing.
The "endorsement" of a non-free project seems to me to reside only in
your imagination. The primary product produced by "The R Project for
Statistical Computing" is the statistical software environment R, which
is released under the GPL. It is free software under anyone's
definition. One can safely infer that members of the R Project clearly
endorse the goals of the GNU Project (as you can see, for example, from
the fact that the only hyperlinks from the "What is R?" web page point
to FSF or GNU). I think that there is no chance that members of the R
project would voluntarily "sever its ties with GNU" over this issue.
It's also not clear that there is any formal process for something
becoming "a GNU project". If there were, you could then go to the GNU
organization or to FSF and convince them to take some action to force
the R project to stop calling itself a GNU project. (I strongly suspect
that there are neither copyright nor trademark nor other enforceable
agreements to cause anything to happen in that regard.)
Now, the web site for the R project does point from its "related
projects" page to R-Forge as a framework where packages that work with R
can be developed. It also displays prominent links to CRAN and to
Bioconductor as locations where users can obtain R packages. In that
sense, I would be willing to agree that the R project "endorses"
R-Rorge, CRAN, and Bioconductor.
However, I strongly object to the idea that this includes an endorsement
of all (or even *any*) of the packages developed or hosted on those
three other sites. There are plenty of R packages in all of those
locations that are provided under licenses other than GPL, LGPL, or
PAL. Some of those licenses are clearly non-free (in both the liberty
and dollar senses).
For example, I use the mclust package (available from CRAN) all the
time. The license for this package requires an annual payment of a
licensing fee for non-academic use, which limits modification and
redistribution. I have developed my own packages that depend on
mclust. The code that I wrote is available under the Perl Artistic
License. But if anyone wants to use my pacakge, they still have to
conform to the terms of use defined by the license for mclust, on which
my package depends. I don't think that the University of Washington
shoudl be prevented from specifying the license terms it wants for
mclust. And I don't think users (academic or otherwise) would get any
beenfits if mclust was prevented from being made available through CRAN.
As far as I can tell, the situation with mclust is directly analogous to
the situation you are complaining about with MOSEK being hosted at R-Forge.
Here's my suggestion. Stop trying to prevent users who want to talk to
MOSEK from R from getting a package that will accomplish that task. Your
real problem seems to be that MOSEK is not free. So do what Stallman
did when he objected to the fact that UNIX was not free. (Or MOTIF. Or
lots of other stuff.) Get some developers together, work in a clean
environment where they won't violate any copyright in the existing code,
and develop a free alternative.
Kevin
On 11/18/2011 12:00 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
I'm sorry about the tone of my previous email. Let me try again in a
cleaner way.
The problem is: R or the organisation behind R via its infrastructure
seems to be endorsing R-Forge, and R-Forge is hosting at least one
project whose sole purpose is to link R with non-free software. This
looks like endorsement of non-free software, which is contrary to the
aims of the GNU project, of which R today claims to be a part.
There are several solutions, but the only workable ones I see are to
either sever ties with the GNU project, clearly remove the endorsement
of the non-free project, or to make the non-free project free. Of
these, it is my sincere hope that the last one happens.
That is all.
- Jordi G. H.
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
