[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi Uwe,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Would you be willing to clarify/confirm the current situation regarding the hosting of non-FOSS packages on CRAN, such as those with ACM or Creative Commons license variants that have non-commercial use restrictions? 

These are presently included in the license.db file.

Are these on CRAN now because they are acceptable under the current policy, or are they on CRAN now, as Duncan posited, because they were acceptable under older policies and it would be disruptive to remove them now?

Thanks,

Marc


> On Oct 23, 2020, at 8:57 AM, Uwe Ligges <ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
> 
> 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
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> 
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