[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

[Marc Schwartz]

> On Oct 22, 2020, at 12:12 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 22/10/2020 11:55 a.m., Marc Schwartz wrote:
>>> On Oct 22, 2020, at 11:19 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz using me.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Oct 22, 2020, at 10:21 AM, Kevin R. Coombes <kevin.r.coombes using gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I am developing a package and getting a NOTE from R CMD check about licenses and ultimate dependencies on a restrictive license, which I can't figure out how to fix.
>>>> 
>>>> My package imports flowCore, which has an Artistic-2.0 license.
>>>> But flowCore imports cytolib, which has a license from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center that prohibits commercial use.
>>>> 
>>>> I tried using the same license as flowCore, but still get the NOTE. Does anyone know which licenses can be used to be compatible with the Fred Hutch license? Or can I just do what flowCore apparently does and ignore the NOTE?
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>  Kevin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi Kevin,
>>> 
>>> I have not looked at BioC's licensing requirements, but presumably, they are ok with the non-commercial use restrictions placed on users of cytolib, thus also on flowCore.
>>> 
>>> If you want your package to be on CRAN, those restrictions on users are not allowed by CRAN's policy:
>>> 
>>> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html
>>> 
>>> "Such packages are not permitted to require (e.g., by specifying in ‘Depends’, ‘Imports’ or ‘LinkingTo’ fields) directly or indirectly a package or external software which restricts users or usage."
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Thus, you would seem to need to make a decision on hosting your package on CRAN, but without the need to import from flowCore/cytolib, or consider hosting your package on BioC, with the attendant restrictions on commercial use.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> Marc Schwartz
>> Well....
>> Now that I look at:
>>   https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db
>> there are a few licenses listed there that do place restrictions on commercial use.
>> These include some Creative Commons Non-Commercial use variants and the ACM license.
>> Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict with the CRAN policy that I quoted above?
>> Anyone with an ability to comment?
> 
> Presumably CRAN would not accept the non-FOSS licenses that are listed in license.db, but R could still do computations on them, as described in ?library in the "Licenses" section.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch


Duncan,

That is a reasonable distinction.

However, upon searching CRAN with available.packages(), I came up with a list of packages that do include Non-Commercial restrictions, including CC BY-NC* and ACM licenses. There may be others that I missed visually scanning the output.

There also appear to be some conflicts/inconsistencies with the 'License_restricts_use' field entry and the 'License' field in some cases, where, for example, most that have "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0" as the license, have "NA" as the entry for restricted use, rather than "yes".

I am not going to list them here, as I don't want to pick on any particular package, but this does seem to point to an inconsistency between packages that are hosted on CRAN and the articulated policy...

Regards,

Marc