[Rd] unlicense

peter dalgaard pdalgd at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 15:22:22 CET 2017 

Probably, one side of the issue is that people are unaware of the dangers of overly permissive statements, like the infamous "collection copyright" which originally applied to collections of medieval music by anonymous composers, but extends to the individual items, so that you can't (say) photocopy "Greensleeves" for classroom use without infringing. 

However, this has also been applied to software collections harvested from the public domain; the notorious example being the Numerical Recipes book claiming licenses to use the subroutines it contained. This is the sort of thing that makes IP lawyers uncomfortable with anything except well standardized licenses.

-pd

On 18 Jan 2017, at 02:32 , 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
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>> 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

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com

More information about the R-devel mailing list