GNU bug report logs - #28946
licence problem with cufflinks

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From: Ricardo Wurmus <rekado <at> elephly.net>
To: Dave Love <fx <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 28946 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#28946: licence problem with cufflinks
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:39:11 +0200

Hi Dave,

> I noticed that there's a package for cufflinks, but it has a non-free
> component.  It isn't packaged for Debian or Fedora because of that.  See
> <https://github.com/cole-trapnell-lab/cufflinks/issues/16>.

Thank you for the information! I’m going to investigate this.

I downloaded an original release of C locfit from

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070616194305/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/project/locfit/dist/locfit.tgz

and compared it to the copy in the Cufflinks repository at commit
d402b182fabd9a831ccb4173e3cb3a2d2dd2e75e (May 2011).

After copying a couple of files from src-c to src they do seem rather
similar, but with about a thousand lines worth of differences (excluding
whitespace changes).  However, it doesn’t look like the code is based on
any of the GPL versions on CRAN[1], because the archives there do not
contain certain files (such as “ar_funs.c”).

If we could be reasonably sure that the code is a derivative of the
GPL’d locfit code from CRAN we essentially deal with a GPL violation,
and not a case of non-free software.

I’ll review this problem and will remove cufflinks by the end of this if
we come to the conclusion that it cannot be considered free.

[1]: https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/locfit/

--
Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
https://elephly.net

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