[R-pkg-devel] Package license

[Daniel Nüst]

Hi!

First of all: IANAL, please get one :-).

On 01/07/16 10:45, Daniel Lüdecke wrote:
> I'm writing a small package that implements this web-bases effect size
> calculator:
> http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/escalc/html/EffectSizeCalculator-OR5.php
> in R.
>
> The calculator is licensed under the Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Do I also have to
> use this license for my package? And if so, is this a valid license for
> R packages?

You can probably license your package CC-BY-NC, but you should be aware 
that this is not an open source license. I would even say that 95% of R 
users would not be able to use your package.

CC discourages usage of this license for software [1], and the 
"noncommercial" aspect is incompatible with all existing definitions of 
(F)OSS.

> I'm happy to use any appropriate license, but I wanted to be sure to be
> formally correct.

I don't really understand how you want to use the linked file. Are you 
re-implementing the functionality? If so, you are not using the software 
but the idea. I would recommend to get in touch with the original author 
and ask if you can use a regular open source license [2, 3].

Hope this helps,
Daniel

[1] 
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software
[2] https://cran.r-project.org/web/licenses/
[3] https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Licensing

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-- 
Daniel Nüst
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi),   University of Münster
Heisenbergstraße 2, 48149 Münster, Germany; +49 251 83 31962
http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/~d_nues01        http://o2r.info