Comments from ftpmaster regarding spdep Debian package

[Roger Bivand]

Hi Andreas,

On Wed, 30 Jul 2014, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi Roger,
>
> I tried to package spdep for Debian on behalf of the Debian Science team.
> The Debian ftpmaster had some issues before he will accept the package.
> Could you please clarify the points below.
>
> Thanks a lot and also thanks for providing spdep as free software
>
>      Andreas.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Thorsten Alteholz <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org> -----
>
> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 11:51:55 +0000
> From: Thorsten Alteholz <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org>
> To: Debian Science Team <debian-science-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>, Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org>
> Cc: Debian FTP Masters <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org>
> Subject: Comments regarding r-cran-spdep_0.5-74-1_amd64.changes
>
> Hi Andreas,
>
> according to spdep/inst/README parts of src/soigraph.c are taken from
> a publication of Camebridge University Press. Can you please confirm
> that the license is really GPLv2+?
>

The code at:

http://cs.smith.edu/~orourke/books/ftp.html
http://cs.smith.edu/~orourke/CGCode/SecondEdition/Ccode2.tar.gz

includes arm/arm.c with the affected functions. This file has:

/*
This code is described in "Computational Geometry in C" (Second Edition),
Chapter 8.  It is not written to be comprehensible without the
explanation in that book.

Prints out one arm configuration to reach given target.
Assumes number of links >= 3.
Input:
    nlinks           Number of links
    L1 L2 ... Ln     Link lengths
    x0 y0            target0
    x1 x2            target1
    ...

Written by Joseph O'Rourke.
Last modified: December 1997
Questions to orourke at cs.smith.edu.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This code is Copyright 1998 by Joseph O'Rourke.  It may be freely
redistributed in its entirety provided that this copyright notice is
not removed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*/

The file src/soigraph.c has:

/* Copyright 2001 by Nicholas Lewin-Koh. ****
* NOTE
* The subroutines TwoCirclesxx and SubVec are adapted for R and Double
* precision coordinates by Nicholas Lewin-Koh, from Computational
* Geometry in C, Joseph O'Rourke, Cambridge University Press
* (1998). Copyright for those subroutines remains his.
****/

(slightly edited on R-forge to cite the arm/arm.c file)

which we would argue meets the requirements of the copyright holder. If 
you disagree, it may be possible to reproduce the functionality using 
another R package.

> spdep/R/bptest.sarlm.R seems to be just GPLv2 and not GPLv2+, doesn't it?

From:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lmtest/index.html

lmtest now is GPL-2 | GPL-3; R source file in spdep updated.

Hope this helps,

Roger

>
> Thorsten
>
>
>
>

-- 
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