[Rd] unlicense

[Karl Millar]

Unfortunately, our lawyers say that they can't give legal advice in
this context.

My question would be, what are people looking for that the MIT or
2-clause BSD license don't provide?  They're short, clear, widely
accepted and very permissive.  Another possibility might be to
dual-license packages with both an OSI-approved license and
whatever-else-you-like, e.g.  'MIT | <my_unusual_license>', but IIUC
there's a bunch more complexity there than just using an OSI-approved
license.

Karl


On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Uwe Ligges
<ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
>
>
> On 18.01.2017 00:13, Karl Millar wrote:
>>
>> Please don't use 'Unlimited' or 'Unlimited + ...'.
>>
>> Google's lawyers don't recognize 'Unlimited' as being open-source, so
>> our policy doesn't allow us to use such packages due to lack of an
>> acceptable license.  To our lawyers, 'Unlimited + file LICENSE' means
>> something very different than it presumably means to Uwe.
>
>
>
> Karl,
>
> thanks for this comment. What we like to hear now is a suggestion what the
> maintainer is supposed to do to get what he aims at, as we already know that
> "freeware" does not work at all and was hard enough to get to the
> "Unlimited" options.
>
> We have many CRAN requests asking for what they should write for "freeware".
> Can we get an opinion from your layers which standard license comes closest
> to what these maintainers probably aim at and will work more or less
> globally, i.e. not only in the US?
>
> Best,
> Uwe
>
>
>
>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Karl
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 12:10 AM, Uwe Ligges
>> <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> from "Writing R Extensions":
>>>
>>> The string ‘Unlimited’, meaning that there are no restrictions on
>>> distribution or use other than those imposed by relevant laws (including
>>> copyright laws).
>>>
>>> If a package license restricts a base license (where permitted, e.g.,
>>> using
>>> GPL-3 or AGPL-3 with an attribution clause), the additional terms should
>>> be
>>> placed in file LICENSE (or LICENCE), and the string ‘+ file LICENSE’ (or
>>> ‘+
>>> file LICENCE’, respectively) should be appended to the
>>> corresponding individual license specification.
>>> ...
>>> Please note in particular that “Public domain” is not a valid license,
>>> since
>>> it is not recognized in some jurisdictions."
>>>
>>> So perhaps you aim for
>>> License: Unlimited
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Uwe Ligges
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 14.01.2017 07:53, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 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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>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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