[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 22/10/2020 12:56 p.m., Marc Schwartz wrote:
> 
>> 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 Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict with the CRAN policy that I quoted above?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...
> 

Perhaps those packages were accepted before this became a policy, and 
now that others depend on them, it would be too disruptive to remove 
them, and users are warned via the 'License_restricts_use' field entry. 
Why does it sometimes contain errors?  That I don't know, other than 
blaming it on Murphy's Law.

Duncan Murdoch