[Bioc-devel] License question
Hi,
pingou wrote:
Dear all, Packaging the Bioconductor libraries for Fedora, we are facing a
First it is great that you are interested in packaging (I am guessing rpm or what ever variant is now popular). I am sure many authors will be glad to help you out. I have a few comments and questions. Could you clarify what you mean by "libraries" here? Bioconductor is a loosely connected set of packages (no libraries), each with potentially different licenses and some with non-standard licenses. We do not require users to adhere to any particular set of licenses, so there will always be packages that do not meet pretty much any set of guidelines.
problem, that I think could be easily solved. Many packages are not clear about their license, most of them are declared to be under the LGPL license, but some of them do not precise clearly which version of this license.
Some specific examples might be nice. Last time I checked most were quite specific, with some exceptions (as I noted above). You might also want to check with Kurt Hornik who not very long ago sent a list of anomalies to us and as far as I know most were resolved, and those that were not are not easily resolvable.
Would it be possible to add a copy of the license used in every package?
Why not do that as part of your packaging if you need it there? In my experience license files get out of date, and references to standard licenses in more or less standard locations tends to be a better practice. In the old days, distributing the LICENSE file was useful as some folks would have had trouble locating it. But these days that is just not true.
Adding this file to R packages is now straightforward, indeed the
announce of the release of R 2.6.0 [1] says :
A standard for specifying package license information in the
DESCRIPTION License field was introduced, see 'Writing R
Extensions'. In addition, files LICENSE or LICENCE in a package
top-level source directory are now installed (so putting copies
into the 'inst' subdirectory is no longer necessary).
Could you possibly add to on the Bioconductor guidelines/requirements
that a copy of the license be added to each package, and which version
of the LGPL is being used? Usually this will be LGPL v2.1 "or any later
version" (saying "or any later version" is very important for
compatibility with newer GNU licenses like LGPL v3 or GPL v3).
We do from time to time ask authors to clarify their licenses, if they can (and some cannot). Personally I am not in favor of either LGPL or GPL v3, and think that such changes are so substantial that package authors would need to make those decisions themselves and should carefully consider the ramifications of such decisions. I would not be comfortable suggesting that they adopt language of the form "or any later version" in regard to the GPL or its variants (or any other license for that matter).
In addition the GNU licenses recommend that the version of the license be added near the top of each source file (e.g. in a comment block):
I can't see how that is of any real benefit to anyone, and certainly a burden on package authors. But your request here may get some to do it. What it does do is to make it harder to change licenses (as every file needs to be modified) or to release under multiple licenses.
This file is part of Biconductor package Foobar.
Foobar is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 2.1 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Foobar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Foobar. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
The GNU project page[2] and Fedora's licensing page[3] have more
information.
Yes, and they seem to require that license changes be announced. That
is really not going to happen. In particular from [3]:
A license change in a package is a very serious event - it has as many,
if not more, implications for related packages as ABI changes do.
Therefore, if your package changes license, even if it just changes the
license version, it is required that you announce it on fedora-devel-list.
Note that any license change to a more restrictive license or license
version may affect the legality of portions of Fedora as a whole; ergo,
FESCo reserves the right to block upgrades of packages to versions with
new licenses to ensure the legal distribution of Fedora.
Please contact FESCo if you have any questions.
Seems like it imposes restrictions on us that we don't want. I am not
sure how you might deal with it, but there is no way we could agree to
these terms.
thanks for your interest
Robert
Adding these license clarifications will greatly increase the speed by which Bioconductor packages can be reviewed and included in Fedora, as we won't have to go manually verifying the license for each package with the individual maintainer, but can simply check the source code. Thanks in advance for this clarification, Best regards, P.Yves [1] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2007/000832.html [2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing
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Robert Gentleman, PhD Program in Computational Biology Division of Public Health Sciences Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 1100 Fairview Ave. N, M2-B876 PO Box 19024 Seattle, Washington 98109-1024 206-667-7700 rgentlem at fhcrc.org