[Rd] unlicense

[Kevin Ushey]

The Free Software Foundation maintains a list of free and GPL-compatible
software licenses here:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Unlicense

It appears that Unlicense is considered a free and GPL-compatible license;
however, the page does suggest using CC0 instead (which is indeed a license
approved / recognized by CRAN). CC0 appears to be the primary license
recommended by the FSF for software intended for the public domain.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 8:32 PM, Karl Millar via R-devel <
r-devel at r-project.org> wrote:

> 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
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ______________________________________________
> >>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> >>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> ______________________________________________
> >>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >>>>
> >>>
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>
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