License status of CRAN packages
I don't have a strong opinion about partitioning the repository, but I don't think partitioning based on whether the license is commonly used for R packages is terribly helpful. AGPL and AGPL + GPL3 are not common licensing schemes for R packages currently, but from the perspective of a useR, there is no relevant distinction between these two rare cases and the more common case of GPL3. So why should packages be put in separate repositories based on this non-distinction? A partition based on whether the package is free according to the FSF definition seems more plausible to me. Ben
Christophe Dutang wrote:
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 ? 18:20, Gabor Grothendieck a ?crit :
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