[R] Checking package licences including dependencies?

[Allan Engelhardt]

On 27/07/10 13:20, Ben Bolker wrote:
> Allan Engelhardt<allane<at>  cybaea.com>  writes:
>
>    
>> I only recently discovered options("available_packages_filters" =
>> list(add = TRUE, "license/FOSS")) [cf. help("available.packages",
>> package="utils") in R 2.10.0 or later] which goes nicely with my
>> options("checkPackageLicense" = TRUE) [new in R 2.11].
>>
>> But now I want to purge my library of packages I would not have
>> installed had I known about this option earlier (I'm looking at you,
>> "gam"!).
>>      
>   What's the problem with gam? The ACM license on akima (on which it
> depends) that requires permission/licensing for
> commercial use?
>    

In a word: yes.  It depends on a non-FOSS package.  This is what the new 
options protect us against.  For this particular project, I want to 
avoid all non-FOSS dependencies.

[OT: Specifically for "gam", I am not sure it is really OK to release it 
as GPL-2 when it depends on a non-free library that, as far as I can 
see, does not meet the definition of a "system library"; see 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs for a 
discussion.  But IANAL and for this project is is a moot point: I want 
to be clean.]

Allan