Comments from ftpmaster regarding spdep Debian package

[Roger Bivand]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi Roger,
>
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 06:42:06PM +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
>> Hi Andreas,
>>
>> Given surveillance rather than my (wrong) guess, I'm willing to do
>> what I can - I agree that actual use in epidemiology is worth
>> facilitating. Should the soigraph issue prove problematic, I'll look
>> at a work-around.
>
> I'll wait for ftpmaster's response and let you know:

OK

>
>> What is the r-cran-maptools issue - I'm also the maintainer of that
>> package? I'm not aware of what might be non-free there; maybe the
>> data files for examples and testing? Nobody has asked me about that.
>
> To explain this I need to come back to the debian/copyright file.  Here
> is the debian/copyright file
>
>   http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-science/packages/R/r-cran-maptools/trunk/debian/copyright?view=diff&r1=45900&r2=46749&diff_format=h
>
> The files on the right side under the tag "Files-Excluded" do not have
> any licensing information.  I have asked years ago (Spring 2009) but did
> not got any answer.  For me (and the users of surveillance the removal
> of these files is perfectly OK.  So in principle I see no stromg reason
> to keep the files if it creates a lot of work for you.
>

The purpose of all the packages I maintain is teaching at graduate levels, 
and all the examples (so the data sets) are included in the packages to 
permit users to reproduce text book results. This software is not an 
application, it is intended to permit learning, first by doing what text 
books say, then learning from own data. This is my ontology. Consequently, 
the licensing/copyright of the code and its documentation is orthogonal to 
that of the data sets.

Note that spdep has far more data than maptools, but this has not been 
questioned. If the data license issues in spdep are not a problem, why 
were they a problem in maptools? Is GPL a relevant license for data sets 
(rhetorical question)? The examples on the help pages all need access to 
data sets - the data sets chosen by me are those that are most relevant 
for relating the methods to text books in which they are discussed.

One (bad/ugly) resolution is to create a separate data set package. 
However, this is a general problem because most CRAN packages face the 
same problem.

By the way, I maintain maptools, and cannot recall being contacted in 
2009. Nicholas contributed code in 2000/2001, but now has nothing to do 
with maptools.

Best wishes,

Roger

> Kind regards
>
>        Andreas.
>
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 91 00
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no