[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

[Ege Rubak]

Hi all,

My two cents are below Marc's summary here:

On Thu, 2020-10-22 at 20:33 -0400, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> Right now, the interpretation, without further clarification from
> CRAN, would be, it is ok for a package to be on CRAN with license
> based usage restrictions included (e.g. for non-commercial use), but
> a package on CRAN, irrespective of it's own license, cannot
> "interact" with other packages that do have restrictions...which
> seems inconsistent.

It depends a bit what is meant by "interact". Years ago `spatstat` used
`gpclib` with a non-commercial license to do polygonal operations. The
solution was to list `gpclib` in `Suggests` and require the user to
make an active choice to use this piece of software with a warning
about non-commercial use. I find this to be an OK solution in lack of
completely free alternatives. These days `gpclib` is still on CRAN and
only has reverse `Suggests` and `Enhances`, so that seems fairly
consistent.

In the long run this was unsatisfatory and our specific problem was
solved by Adrian Baddeley by making the `polyclip` package.

Kind regards,
Ege