[R-pkg-devel] license for package

[Pieter Eendebak]

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

>
> On 29 May 2015 at 11:44, Pieter Eendebak wrote:
> | Dear developers,
> |
> | How can I specify the license for my package when my package includes
> some
> | code with other licenses (and different copyright holders). In
> particular:
> |
> | - my package is BSD 2-clause
> | - my packages in includes MPL-2 code (Eigen math library)
>
> Narrow comment: If you do 'LinkingTo: RcppEigen' you do not need to include
> the Eigen headers yourself.
>

This is a good suggestion. I works for my code, so I can now leave out
Eigen for the source of the R package.


>
> | - my package includes some MIT code (different author)
>
> You cannot relicense code by other people.  Their license stays.
>
> I agree, but still I would like to be able to include source code from
other people (as long as licenses are compatible). To be concrete: how can
one distribute a file like msstdint.h (https://code.google.com/p/msinttypes/)
within an R package and have the licenses properly set in the DESCRIPTION
file?



> You have some choice in how you license _your_ code in the package.  That
> said, license "cross-products" have conflicts, but licensing your code
> under
> BSD-2 in the context of the GPL-2'ed R / MIT'ed other parts should be fine.
> See the links in Thomas's post for more.
>
> Lastly, in many cases [eg when you link against libR], the "aggregate work"
> will be under GPL (>= 2) anyway.  But within the "aggregate work" the code
> you added can be under a different license (as long as it is compatible).
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]