[R-pkg-devel] GPL + other licence

[Brian G. Peterson]

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see why the entire package can't be
released under GPL, while also respecting the QHull license for the
QHull code and the derived QHull portions.

Many existing R packages released under GPL, and R itself, include BSD
and MIT licensed code.

The QHull license is a very permissive license, basically BSD or MIT-
like in its permissions.

BSD and MIT code may be included in GPL'd code, as long as its license
(inclusion of the copyright notice, etc.) is also included where
required.

GPL applies to the entire work, in this case the R package.  I think
you should discuss this with the CRAN maintainers and release the
package under GPL.

Regards,

Brian

-- 
Brian G. Peterson
http://braverock.com/brian/
Ph: 773-459-4973
IM: bgpbraverock

On Tue, 2018-04-10 at 11:45 +0200, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:
> There are 3 solutions.  (1) You (get permission) to change the
> library to
> GPL.  (2) You get permission to change the license of the R code to
> whatever license the library is released under.  (3) you split the
> package.
> 
> You have investigated (1) and it does not work.  I would suggest
> thinking
> about (2) provided the license of the library is decent.  This is
> what we
> did with Rgraphviz some years ago; Graphviz itself is licensed under
> the
> Eclipse public license and there was no way I could get a company to
> change
> the license of that code.
> 
> I would do whatever I can to avoid splitting the package.
> 
> Best,
> Kasper
> 
> On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 8:44 PM, David C Sterratt <david.c.sterratt at ed
> .ac.uk>
> wrote:
> 
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I'd appreciate help with a licence conundrum I have with the
> > geometry
> > package (https://davidcsterratt.github.io/geometry/) that I
> > maintain.
> > 
> > The geometry package contains some functions (e.g. convhulln(),
> > delaunayn()) that wrap the Qhull library (http://www.qhull.org),
> > which
> > has its own, non-GPL, licence. The geometry package includes this
> > source
> > code, and wraps it in C files that have GPL licence headers.
> > 
> > The geometry package also has functions that are not derived from
> > Qhull
> > code and which are licensed under GPL, including a number of
> > functions
> > that are ports of the Matlab distmesh package, and some other
> > useful
> > functions to do with triangulation and coordinate systems (e.g.
> > tsearch() and cart2bary()).
> > 
> > I inherited this situation when I took over maintaining the package
> > 8
> > years ago, though I have added functions to both Qhull-derived and
> > GPL
> > categories.
> > 
> > In October last year I submitted the latest version of the geometry
> > package, which adds quite a bit of useful functionality:
> > https://github.com/davidcsterratt/geometry/blob/master/pkg/NEWS
> > 
> > I received the following response from the CRAN maintainers:
> > 
> >   For the license. It is CRAN policy that a package has to have a
> > single
> >   license. Can you manage to convince all copyright hoders (e.g. of
> >   Qhull) to relicense under GPL?
> > 
> > I tried persuading the author of Qhull. He replied:
> > 
> >   There's only one license and that's the one included with the
> > code
> >   (COPYING.txt). Several years ago, I tried to clarify the license
> > with
> >   the Univ. of Minn. but had no success. So I think the best
> > approach is
> >   to keep the original license as is. It has not been an issue so
> > far.
> > 
> > At the same time as I wrote to the Qhull maintainer, I wrote to the
> > CRAN
> > maintainers:
> > 
> >   I have written to the Qhull maintainer, but I doubt he will want
> > to
> >   change the license, since Qhull is used in proprietary software
> > such
> >   as MATLAB. Assuming this is the case, we'll have to create a new
> >   package - I would need help with managing the change for
> > dependent
> >   packages.
> > 
> > The CRAN maintainers replied:
> > 
> >   Please try to find out how this can work.
> > 
> > In principle I could create a package containing only the functions
> > derived from Qhull (but still with GPL headers in the wrapper C
> > files,
> > see e.g.,
> > https://github.com/davidcsterratt/geometry/blob/
> > master/pkg/src/Rconvhulln.c
> > But wouldn't this package still have to have two licenses, due to
> > the
> > GPL headers?
> > 
> > I don't want to start on any package splitting without having a
> > plan
> > agreed that I know will be OK for CRAN. It would be quite a bit of
> > work,
> > as there are a number of packages that depend on geometry, so I
> > would
> > have to check all the revdeps for functions that they call in the
> > geometry package. I would have to then perhaps write wrapper
> > functions
> > in the geometry package to make sure any functions moved to a new
> > package still worked when called from revdeps.
> > 
> > I know the CRAN maintainers are busy, so any help from the list
> > would be
> > much appreciated.
> > 
> > Best wishes,
> > 
> > David.
> > 
> > --
> > David C Sterratt, Senior Research Associate
> > Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of
> > Informatics
> > University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB,
> > Scotland,
> > UK
> > http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/sterratt - tel: +44 131 651 1739
> > 
> > --
> > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> > Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-package-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
> > 
> 
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