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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 November 2016 at 09:11, Lenth, Russell V wrote:
| 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.

No, let's stop here.  I don't think that is legally (or conceptually !!)
possible. Your code, your repo, ... are all self-contained and "fine".  But,
and the big but, is that GPL-3 stipulates no mixing with GPL-2.
 
| 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.

"violate" is IMHO not the correct terms.  More like "prohibits use" per terms in GPL-3.
See eg

   https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html

   https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html


| 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?)

Yes as said yesterday. "GPL (>= 2)" aka "GPL-2 | GPL-3" does.  You can of
course use _only_ GPL-3 (but there are a lot of people around R who keep
GPL-2, including R itself (!!) -- see 'license()' as the startup prompt
suggests and numerous packages written by R Core and others).

|       -- 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

Maybe -- but moving to Suggests, as easy as it seems, is probably not a real
solution as you still have co-use. Spirit of the law, letter of the law. In
any event that applies only to 'bar', and you are 'foo'.

Dirk
 
| 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
| 
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