[R] Making a new package: licence

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Federico Calboli
<f.calboli at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:

> The vast majority of CRAN libraries seem to be released under some sort of GPL version. I never seen a license though.

 You're right. The GNU people say "should":

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

---

You should also include a copy of the license itself somewhere in the
distribution of your program. All programs, whether they are released
under the GPL or LGPL, should include the text version of the GPL. In
GNU programs the license is usually in a file called COPYING.

 ---

But it seems you have to add a copyright and permission notice to every file:

---
Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two
elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such
as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying
permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of
the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).
---

I just picked one random R package from CRAN ("tgram") and it doesn't
comply (no copyright mention, no LICENSE file, just License: GPL (>=2)
in the DESCRIPTION). I suspect most of my own code doesn't comply
either. Told you I wasn't a lawyer...

Barry