[Rd] Including full text of open source licenses in a package

[Hadley Wickham]

On Saturday, September 12, 2020, Hugh Parsonage <hugh.parsonage using gmail.com>
wrote:

> Perhaps I have misread that excerpt from WRE, but my read is that
> package authors should not duplicate GNU COPYING, since it is present
> in all R distributions already when using GPL-2 and friends.  It
> doesn't apply to packages distributed with other licenses.
>
>
The directory to which it refers, https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/,
includes many open source licenses, not just those used for R. I’m also
pretty sure I’ve had a package fail CRAN submission for this problem in the
past.


> It should be noted that in GPL FAQ just below the part you quoted it says
> > A clear statement in the program's README file is legally sufficient as
> long as that accompanies the code, but it is easy for them to get separated.
>

That question (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly) is
about whether a copy of the license in a file is sufficient, or whether you
must also include a statement at the top of every source file.

Hadley


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