[Rd] License status of CRAN packages

[Christophe Dutang]

Hi all,

I think for the common licences, we should also add BSD licence... for  
example my pkg randtoolbox (which is currently with incompatible  
licences) will probably be in a near future with the BSD licence.

Anyway I like the idea of two different repositories for GPL like  
licensed pkg and other packages.

Christophe

Le 24 avr. 09 à 18:20, Gabor Grothendieck a écrit :

> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Ben Goodrich <goodrich at fas.harvard.edu 
> > wrote:
>> Kurt Hornik wrote:
>>> AGPL, unfortunately, allows supplements, and hence cannot fully be
>>> standardized.  We've been thinking about extending the current  
>>> scheme to
>>> indicate a base license plus supplements, but this is still work in
>>> progress.
>>
>> This would be helpful. I would just reemphasize that a package that
>> includes some AGPL code and some GPL3 code is standard as far as  
>> the FSF
>> is concerned, e.g. from section 13 of the AGPL:
>>
>> "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
>> permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
>> under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single  
>> combined
>> work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License  
>> will
>> continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work
>> with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the  
>> GNU
>> General Public License."
>>
>> So, I think that CRAN should at least have a canonical spec that  
>> covers
>> *this* situation. Other situations may be more complicated to handle
>> elegantly.
>
> Another possibility is to simply standardize the set of licenses  
> that CRAN
> supports.  GPL licenses (GPl-2, GPL-2.1, GPL-3, LGPL), MIT and
> X11 already cover 98% of all packages on CRAN.   If there truly is an
> advantage to the AGPL license perhaps a standard version could be  
> offered
> in the set.  Perhaps, for the 2% of packages that want a different  
> license
> a second repository could be made available.
>
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--
Christophe Dutang
Ph. D. student at ISFA, Lyon, France
website: http://dutangc.free.fr