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

[Lenth, Russell V]

Permission of "all other copyright holders" as in developers of all packages that depend on 'foo'?

Russ

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 6, 2016, at 9:31 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 06/11/2016 4:11 AM, 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.
>> 
>> 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
> 
> And a third way is for the developer of 'bar' to allow it to be dual licensed as GPL 2 or 3, or something else more permissive than GPL 3. They may not be able to do that if they are not the sole copyright holder, just as you won't be able to do 1 without the permission of all other copyright holders.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> 
>> 
>> 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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