Including full text of open source licenses in a package
On Saturday, September 12, 2020, Hugh Parsonage <hugh.parsonage at gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps I have misread that excerpt from WRE, but my read is that package authors should not duplicate GNU COPYING, since it is present in all R distributions already when using GPL-2 and friends. It doesn't apply to packages distributed with other licenses.
The directory to which it refers, https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/, includes many open source licenses, not just those used for R. I?m also pretty sure I?ve had a package fail CRAN submission for this problem in the past.
It should be noted that in GPL FAQ just below the part you quoted it says
A clear statement in the program's README file is legally sufficient as
long as that accompanies the code, but it is easy for them to get separated.
That question (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly) is about whether a copy of the license in a file is sufficient, or whether you must also include a statement at the top of every source file. Hadley
http://hadley.nz [[alternative HTML version deleted]]