[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

[Uwe Ligges]

I do not want to make many general comments about licenses in public, as 
this is a very difficult matter and I am not a lawyer.

But let me cite from the CRAN policies:

"Packages with licenses not listed at 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db will 
generally not be accepted. "

Further, I see in the discussions that you talked about depending on a 
software with a non-FOSS license. The CRAN team's point of view, for 
short, is:
A package with a FOSS license cannot strictly depend on a 
package/software that is non-FOSS. Obviously, the FOSS package cannot be 
used under its own license conditions in that case.

Best,
Uwe Ligges




On 23.10.2020 14:25, Ege Rubak wrote:
> 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
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-package-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
>