[Rd] unlicense

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13/01/2017 3:21 PM, Charles Geyer wrote:
>>
>> I would like the unlicense (http://unlicense.org/) added to R
>> licenses.  Does anyone else think that worthwhile?
>>
>
> That's a question for you to answer, not to ask.  Who besides you thinks
> that it's a good license for open source software?
>
> If it is recognized by the OSF or FSF or some other authority as a FOSS
> license, then CRAN would probably also recognize it.  If not, then CRAN
> doesn't have the resources to evaluate it and so is unlikely to recognize
> it.

Unlicense is listed in https://spdx.org/licenses/

Debian does include software "licensed" like this, and seems to think
this is one way (not the only one) of declaring something to be
"public domain".  The first two examples I found:

https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/r/rasqal/copyright-0.9.29-1
https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/w/wiredtiger/copyright-2.6.1%2Bds-1

This follows the format explained in
https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-specification,
which does not explicitly include Unlicense, but does include CC0,
which AFAICT is meant to formally license something so that it is
equivalent to being in the public domain. R does include CC0 as a
shorthand (e.g., geoknife).

https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ says that

<quote>

Licenses currently found in Debian main include:

- ...
- ...
- public domain (not a license, strictly speaking)

</quote>

The equivalent for CRAN would probably be something like "License:
public-domain + file LICENSE".

-Deepayan

> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
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