On Oct 14, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Stacey Wood wrote:

> Thanks everyone.  Now I know that I should not include another copy of the license, but where should I refer to the copies on http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/? In the DESCRIPTION file?
> 
> Stacey


<snip>

Not in the DESCRIPTION file.  :-)

Given the prior comments, I did some checking on the Recommended packages (presuming that they can be used as correct examples) and there seems to be some variability present. In some cases, the COPYING file is included in the main source package folder, so that it is available in the distribution of the package source tarball, but as Dirk noted, it is not installed. 

You can then include a LICENCE file in the 'inst' directory, where that file has content along the lines of the following (based upon V&R's MASS) for GPL2:


Copyrights
==========

<List any relevant copyrights here>


Licence
=======

    This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; version 2. 

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

Files share/licenses/GPL-2 in the R
(source or binary) distribution is a copy of version 2 
of the 'GNU General Public License'.
These can also be viewed at http://www.r-project.org/licenses/



So in the above case, the LICENCE file will be available in both the source and binary/installed versions of the package, but without duplicating the content of the full COPYING file.

HTH,

Marc


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