[Bioc-devel] Copyright disclamers, licenses etc.

A.J. Rossini rossini at blindglobe.net
Tue Mar 30 18:24:08 CEST 2004


Jeff Gentry <jgentry at jimmy.harvard.edu> writes:

>> Sorry if there's an obvious answer to this, that I've missed, but what
>> are people doing with respect to licenses for their packages, and
>> disclaimers and stuff like that?
>
> In the end, it is really up to the package author.
>
> The general policy for Bioconductor is that packages that are intended to
> be more infrastructure oriented are preferred to be under something on the
> less restrictive side (e.g. LGPL is a common one, BSD is certainly 'less
> restrictive'), but as I said, at this point at least - it is really up to
> the authors, we haven't really gotten into the business of managing all of
> the potential license choices.
>
> One potential issue is if someone has put a more restrictive license on
> their package, e.g. "for educational use only" or something like
> that.  When this issue was last discussed (and I'm sure I'll be corrected
> here if I'm wrong), my understanding was that we'd still distribute it as
> any other package and any potential licensing issues are between the
> author/maintainer and the downloader.
>
> For my own personal side, I use LGPL for the packages that I author (I
> believe we have one or two BSD licensed packages, and perhaps a small
> handful of other 'other licenses' but the rest are some mix of LGPL and
> GPL) simply due to philosophical issues I have against the proper GPL, but
> as I said twice already - it is really up to the author :)

What  Jeff said -- but note that you might consider ramifications if
your package is to be used by other packages (i.e. if you choose GPL
or "noncommercial use only" (which had better be well defined, that
quote is NOT), it gets a bit weird for folks using your package if
they don't want to follow your licensing plans.

That being said, I usually use GPL for code that is "end-product",
LGPL for "building blocks".

best,
-tony

-- 
rossini at u.washington.edu            http://www.analytics.washington.edu/ 
Biomedical and Health Informatics   University of Washington
Biostatistics, SCHARP/HVTN          Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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