[Rd] alternate licensing for package data?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 22 April 2015 at 11:34, Roger Bivand wrote:
| While I agree with Martyn with respect to code, documentation, and
| vignettes, the point Ben raises is relevant and not obvious. Data sets in
| say GLP-licensed packages are on occasion challenged by Debian packagers

Not generally the packagers (who get frustrated by this like everybody else)
but by the "ftp-masters" teams who look over what gets into the Archive. 

They are the license reviewers, and gate-keepers.

In several cases we (ie "packagers") had to write README.sources to document
origins of datasets.  That is generally a little silly as ... R itself
already enforces in the .Rd files. So for the packages where I had to do that
the README.sources effectively becomes a forward reference to the R docs.
But then again the ftp-masters review _thousands_ of packages and having to
help their workflow is a small burden.

In general, nitpicky licensing issue have been discussed (to mindnumbing
length) on the debian-legal list. Those interested in the issue may want to
peruse or search the archive:
    http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal

Dirk

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