[R-pkg-devel] Possible open-source license incompatibilities within R packages

[Hadley Wickham]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2025 at 2:08 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 2025-09-08 10:55 a.m., Ilmari Tamminen wrote:
> > I would like to release my R code under GPL-3. The code depends on a
> package (lme4) that itself uses "GPL >= 2", but which has upstream
> dependencies (minqa, numDeriv, rbibutils) that are GPL-2 only.  According
> to what I've read (see below), GPL-2 and GPL-3 are incompatible. Are the
> GPL-2 upstream licenses a problem for my GPL-3 R code? If so, are there
> recommended ways of resolving this?
>
> My understanding is that the licenses of other packages are only
> relevant if you are incorporating their code into yours and would like
> to release the combined work.
>
> If your code uses some other package but you are not distributing the
> other package then their license doesn't affect your package.
>
> For example, many packages (including R itself) are written to use
> Windows functions, but since they don't distribute copies of those
> functions the fact that Windows isn't open source doesn't matter.
>

This is my belief too, and I've written a bit about it at
https://r-pkgs.org/license.html#code-you-use

Hadley

-- 
http://hadley.nz

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