Comments from ftpmaster regarding spdep Debian package

[Roger Bivand]

Hi Andreas,

Sorry, you are right about 2009. I agree with your decision.

We'll see what the response on spdep is before making changes. I 
anticipate that bptest is resolved but that soigraph isn't.

I'll start looking at the option of moving spdep/maptools etc. data sets 
to a separate package (EcDat is a package with only economics data sets, 
maybe I can lear from it).

Best wishes,

Roger


On Fri, 1 Aug 2014, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi Roger,
>
> On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 09:33:21AM +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
>>>> 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.
>
> I forwarded your answer upon this issue from  Wed, 11 Mar 2009 to the
> mailing list so it is searchable:
>
>   https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2009/03/msg00032.html
>
> I think the main problem here is that "free" as per Debian's free
> software guidelines includes the freedom to change the *files*.  If you
> can not grant this freedom (and I can follow your arguing here that
> changing scientific data is not a good idea and is orthogonal to the
> freedom to change code) per definition it is non-free.
>
> So my crack on this was to drop the data (and once this might be
> accepted deliver an accompanying data package in "non-free") for the
> profit of the users who are intending to simply run their
> epidemiological tools without any specific interest in running maptools
> examples.
>
> I hope this sounds sensible to you
>
>      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