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.