[R-pkgs] OpenMX structural equation software

[John Fox]

Dear R users,

The OpenMx developer team takes great pride in announcing the availability
of OpenMx 1.0. The team would like to express its gratitude to the large
number of beta-testers who have helped us improve the code. Thank you.

OpenMx is a free suite of R functions and a estimation back-end that
supports fitting a wide variety of structural equation models including
multiple groups, full information ML for missing data, ordinal estimation
with thresholds, multilevel, latent class, and mixture distributions to name
a few.

The most current version of OpenMx (for Mac, Windows and most Linux
variants) may be downloaded by issuing the following R command:

source('http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu/getOpenMx.R')

OpenMx is not currently hosted on CRAN due to a license restriction on the
one portion of our code, an optimizer, that was not written by the project.
We hope to remedy this situation reasonably soon as we are working on an
open source version of the optimizer.  The remainder of the project is
licensed under Apache 2.0 and the source code may be downloaded from the
OpenMx website and used for any purpose you wish.  We do hope that you wish
to contribute improvements or bug fixes back to the project, but we do not
require it.

The OpenMx website is http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu, where we host a set
of manuals and tutorials, a wiki, and a set of user forums where issues to
do with OpenMx and SEM in general can be discussed.  We require free
registration in order to post to the forums or wiki so as to slow down the
spambots, but everything else is available without registration.

OpenMx has been in development for 3 years.  The OpenMx beta test program
began in October 2009. Since then, we have improved the interface and sped
up the optimization times considerably. Many new features are in the works
and we encourage you to post to the Wish List forum so that we know what you
would like to see.

>From this point on, we will maintain two binary releases: a stable release
numbered as 1.x.x, and a development binary with the latest and greatest
features and bug-fixes, numbered with the current revision number (e.g.,
1448). The development of OpenMx is on-going and we expect that new
development binaries will be released often. The stable releases are likely
to be updated every few months or so.

For the OpenMx team.

John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Senator William McMaster 
  Professor of Social Statistics
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox