ABOUT ALGORITHMS:
The Locfit implementation has been designed largely from the point
of view of generality: to provide a set of functions that can be
used for as wide a range of local fitting problems as possible.
It is not intended to be the fastest or most efficient implementation
possible. In addition to generality, the code in many places makes
extensive trade-offs made between speed and numerical accuracy (some
of which can be controlled through optional arguments). Many of Locfit's
options will only be used in a small fraction of cases; for other cases,
they add to the cost of overhead (an obvious example is multi-dimensional
fitting: when used in 1-d, many loops reduce to for(i=0;i<1;i++)).
Additionally, the user interfaces (i.e. the R and S-Plus code) add
significantly to the computational overhead. For these reasons, the
Locfit code, as distributed, should not, and can not, be used to
derive meaningful benchmarks, either for the speed or accuracy of algorithms.
Anyone wishing to use Locfit in any kind of comparative benchmark
study must contact and obtain permission from the Author.
COPYRIGHT:
Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories.
SCB code is
Copyright (c) 1996-2001 Jiayang Sun.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
purpose (with the exceptions noted in `About Algorithms' above)
without fee is hereby granted, and provided that this entire notice is
included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or
modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting
documentation for such software.
THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
WARRANTY. IN PARTICULAR, NEITHER THE AUTHOR NOR LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE
MERCHANTABILITY OF THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
The algorithm exception means that locfit is not free software as it cannot be used for any purpose. This is why cufflinks has only ever been available for GNU Guix in a third-party channel for non-free software (even though Cufflinks itself is free software).
There are a few things to note here:
the above license notice is not included in the copied locfit sources included in cufflinks; the license should be included, because the license demands it and because it makes it obvious to packagers that the combined work is not free software (and thus cannot be included in Debian or Guix)
the variant of locfit for R does not include the non-free restriction and really is free software -- could the existing copy of locfit be replaced with the free variant of locfit?
does cufflinks perhaps have been granted a free software license by the authors of locfit that supersedes the original license?
It would be great if this could be clarified, so that cufflinks can be included in free software distributions such as Debian or Guix.
Hello,
the cufflinks sources include a modified third-party library "locfit" that is released under a license asking any use for benchmarks to be authorized. Below is the relevant excerpt from the README file that is included in the source tarball that can be downloaded here: http://web.archive.org/web/20150227223132/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/project/locfit/index.html
The algorithm exception means that locfit is not free software as it cannot be used for any purpose. This is why cufflinks has only ever been available for GNU Guix in a third-party channel for non-free software (even though Cufflinks itself is free software).
There are a few things to note here:
It would be great if this could be clarified, so that cufflinks can be included in free software distributions such as Debian or Guix.