Citation if copying R base code
On Nov 6, 2014 3:36 AM, "Duncan Murdoch" <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
On 06/11/2014, 5:57 AM, Peter Meissner wrote:
Dear Listeners, ... also I read the CRAN policies and tried to solve those questions myself I feel very much in the need of good advise ... I am currently finishing a package that -- to solve some nasty problems with dirty data -- uses its own as.Date() equivalent methods (i.e. its own generic and methods). Thereby, I shamelessly copied code from the as.Date() methods from the base package and only made some minor adjustments.
There's no problem doing that, as long as you respect the license. That includes keeping the copyright notices from the files where you found the code: see the GPL
For my main achievement was copy-pasting I feel obliged to cite the efforts made by base package authors - do I, should I? Currently I only use the help files to mention that the generic and its methods are basically the same as as.Date(), except this and that.
In your package help file it would be polite to describe the contributions from the R source code. In the DESCRIPTION file, the rule is that all "significant" contributors must be included. You'll need to judge that, but from your description, I'd guess this counts.
And if yes how to do it best? What is the standard procedure here? Should I include base package authors as contributors in DESCRIPTION??? Am I allowed to use MIT + file license with that or is it wrong to do
so?
No, you must use the GPL, since the code you copied is licensed under the GPL. You can choose to use version 2 or 3 (or both). You do not have permission to re-license R code under a different license.
Theoretically you could ask the copyright holder of that piece of code whether he/she/it allows you to use a different license. This brings up another question: who is formally the copyright holder of the R source code (and documentation)? The R Foundation, the individual who contributed the code in the first place, or someone else? You could certainly imagine a case where a piece of code was donated to R by someone, e.g. the code originates from a user-contributed package and has not been modified since. It may even be that that code was licensed under another license at the time. Henrik
Duncan Murdoch
I appreciate any advise on these (I think important) but very confusing matters of referencing and licensing. Best, Peter PS: - My current description: https://github.com/petermeissner/wikipediatrend/blob/master/DESCRIPTION - the package specific as.Date() implementation: https://github.com/petermeissner/wikipediatrend/blob/master/R/wp_date.R
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