I wonder if there are some unintended intricacies involving licenses that need to be addressed.
For example, GPL lets you do lots of things privately but restricts your ability to distribute. And there is a good deal of useful GPL glue out there (Octave, R, etc). Sometimes it might be expedient to just use FastICA rather than limit yourself to what's available and what the GPL might allow you to distribute. This gets really murky because the FSF is not really clear at all about what constitutes a derived work in scripting languages (which are distinct because source and executable are indistinguishable--the FSF (i.e. the advice you get from licensing@) plays pretty loose with this, choosing to draw the line on a somewhat arbitrary in a case-by-case manner).
Or maybe academic publication automatically qualifies as a fair use exception?
For example, GPL lets you do lots of things privately but restricts your ability to distribute. And there is a good deal of useful GPL glue out there (Octave, R, etc). Sometimes it might be expedient to just use FastICA rather than limit yourself to what's available and what the GPL might allow you to distribute. This gets really murky because the FSF is not really clear at all about what constitutes a derived work in scripting languages (which are distinct because source and executable are indistinguishable--the FSF (i.e. the advice you get from licensing@) plays pretty loose with this, choosing to draw the line on a somewhat arbitrary in a case-by-case manner).
Or maybe academic publication automatically qualifies as a fair use exception?