[Rd] License status of CRAN packages

Ben Goodrich goodrich at fas.harvard.edu
Thu Apr 23 23:30:13 CEST 2009


Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Ben Goodrich <goodrich at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd <at> debian.org> writes:
>>> As a non-exhautive list with possible misclassifications, cran2deb currently
>>> has these packasges as 'maybe not free' and does not build them:
>>>
>>>      BARD,BayesDA,CoCo,ConvCalendar,FAiR,PTAk,RScaLAPACK,Rcsdp,SDDA,SGP,
>>>      alphahull,ash,asypow,caMassClass,gpclib,mapproj,matlab,mclust,mclust02,
>>>      mlbench,optmatch,rankreg,realized,rngwell19937,rtiff,rwt,scagnostics,
>>>      sgeostat,spatialkernel,tlnise,xgobi
>> Small point: FAiR is free. The file LICENSE thing just clarifies that most of
>> the code is AGPL but a couple files can't be included under the AGPL and are
>> plain GPL. As far as I can see, R does not give me the option of saying so in a
>> "standard" way, e.g. putting License: AGPL (>= 3) in the DESCRIPTION file would
>> only be 95% accurate and putting License: AGPL (>= 3) | GPL (>= 3) is misleading.
> 
> How about "
> 
> License: AGPL except for 2 GPL files
> 

If that would make anyone's life easier without making anyone else's
life harder, I would be happy to put that in the DESCRIPTION file. I
have been doing file LICENSE because it parses on

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FAiR/index.html

and people can click to the LICENSE link to read the details if they are
interested. But maybe that is not optimal. Dirk?

Ben



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