[R] Where: package licenses

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 30 Mar 2004, Douglas Bates wrote:

> Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 Jason.L.Higbee at stls.frb.org wrote:
> > 
> > > R:
> > >
> > > This stems from my curiosity about the previous thread about  a request
> > > for glm.nb code.  The issue of package licenses was brought up and I was
> > > hoping for some clarification on that.  Using the function license() or
> > > licence() gives info on the license for R, but something like
> > > license(MASS) does not give info on the license for the MASS package
> > > (perhaps it might be good to expand the license function in the way
> > > described).  A quick look on CRAN didn't yield any info on package
> > > licenses either.
> > 
> > The DESCRIPTION file for a package lists the license; this is also given
> > in the CRAN entry for each package.
> 
> and in the result of
> 
> help(package = "MASS")

Also, MASS (like many other packages) installs a file called LICENCE (it's 
in English ...) in its top-level directory.  

My point is that you are not allowed to redistribute even parts of it
without the licence, and that is what the original requestor was
explicitly asking for.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595