[Rd] License status of CRAN packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 23 April 2009 at 15:35, Marc Schwartz wrote:
| There is a list of acceptable entries that are defined as part of the  
| specs in R-exts (see page 4). Perhaps this needs to be "tightened" a  
| bit, at least in so far as packages passing R CMD check for the  
| purpose of inclusion on CRAN. That would include perhaps altering the  
| ability to use the 'file LICENSE' option, which at present leaves the  
| door wide open for non-standard approaches. It may also have to check  
| for DEPENDS and whether they too are on CRAN and passed the  
| appropriate license checks.

Exactly. 

| Packages that fail this check should not be included on CRAN and the  
| package author would then be obligated to find other distribution  
| resources or contact the CRAN maintainers to advocate that their  
| licensing schema should be acceptable.
| 
| Then the end user can at least have some comfort in knowing that  
| anything they get from CRAN comes under a compatible license for  
| general use without restriction. They would have to intentionally use  
| other sources for packages that fail the CRAN requirements.

Exactly.  I think we may have to work on tightening the standards of CRAN
re-distribution.

| If other distribution venues, such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora elect to  

cran2deb does not have inclusion to Debian in mind. What Charles and I are
thinking about is something aking to the Windows situation: suitable i386 and
amd64 binaries (for Debian Linux) provided from CRAN for as many packages as
possible.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.