[R-pkg-devel] Relicense to GPL-3?

[Lenth, Russell V]

A correction and clarification...

It is MY package's GPL-2 license that is being violated by the other package -- not its GPL-3 license.

Let me lay it out with some generic names:
  * The 'foo' package specifies a GPL-2 license
  * The 'bar' package depends on 'foo', but specifies a GPL-3 license. That violates foo's GPL-2 license.

More details:
  * 'foo' provides a particular type of analysis embodied in a function named 'manchoo', 
     and provides methods for various classes.
  * 'bar' provides an S3 method for 'manchoo', via statements like this in its NAMESPACE file:
        importFrom(foo, manchoo)
        S3method(manchoo, bar)
  * The developer of 'foo' welcomes such expanded availability of 'manchoo' methods.

So there seem to be two ways to resolve this:
  1. The developer of 'foo' changes its license to GPL-3 (does that indeed resolve the license issue?)
      -- OR --
  2. The developer of 'bar' removes the dependency on 'foo', by not importing 'manchoo' or its
      S3method; instead, it simply exports the function 'manchoo.bar' and moves 'foo' to Suggests

Thanks for any suggestions

Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: Lenth, Russell V 
Sent: Saturday, November 5, 2016 9:28 PM
To: 'r-package-devel at r-project.org' <r-package-devel at r-project.org>
Subject: Relicense to GPL-3?

Dear all,

I received an email from a user telling me that another package that depends on my package is licensed GPL(>=3), whereas mine is licensed GPL-2; and that therefore, the other package is in violation of its GPL-3 license. This apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing that other package into the "unstable" category.

Moreover, the correspondent asks me if I would consider changing the license for my package. To what is not specified, but I guess it would be to GPL-3.

I don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and not mine. But on the other hand, I don't want to cause problems for others. The licensing stuff is hard for me to understand - in large part because of low motivation to dig into it; I really would rather think about providing better code and features than all sorts of legal gobble-de-gook. Nonetheless, I guess this stuff is important to some people (e.g., Debian) so I suppose I had better get it right.

My decision to put GPL-2 in the first place was primarily expedience: it seemed like what people wanted. So is GPL-3 "better"? Do I risk anything by changing it? Do I risk anything by not changing it? How much does it matter, really?

Thanks

Russ

Russell V. Lenth  -  Professor Emeritus
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science The University of Iowa  -  Iowa City, IA 52242  USA Voice (319)335-0712 (Dept. office)  -  FAX (319)335-3017