News from the R Consortium

The R Consortium has been quite busy lately, so I thought I'd take a moment to bring you up to speed on some recent news. (Disclosure: Microsoft is a member of the R Consortium, and I am a member of its board of directors.)

• Many R Consortium funded projects are underway. The "Quantities for R" project has released its first working prototype, the DBI project for database interfaces to R is near completion, and the second SatRDays conference was recently held in Cape Town.
• A survey of R package developers on licensing, revealed several insights on motivations behind choices on open source licenses.
• R-Ladies has been promoted to a top-level R Consortium project, and project lead Gabriela de Queiroz joins the Infrastructure Steering Committee.

You can keep up with news from the R Consortium by following @RConsortium on Twitter, or at the R Consortium blog.

 

Comments

[Ian Fellows]

I am pretty concerned by the consortium proposal of an automatic package license violation detection tool. There is a wide array of legal opinions with regard to what is or isn't allowable, with much grey area. Very little has been tested in a court of law so solid precedent is difficult to come by. For example, the FSF has its own interpretation of "derivative" that many lawyers disagree with.

So whose legal opinion will get enshrined in the tool, and for what country's laws?

When programmers see a problem, they'll try to use code to solve it, but that isn't always possible or wise.

[David Smith]

@Ian, It's definitely a thorny issue. I believe the primary goal is to raise potential issues to developers, but solving them is a much trickier problem as you point out. This topic is being discussed in the Code Coverage Working Group, and your input would be very welcome!

[Ian Fellows]

@david, I'd be happy to provide input. I don't exactly see where to do so in the link, and didn't see where in the covr package these checks were being done. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail any time on this.