legitimate use of :::
On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Trevor Davis <trevor.l.davis at gmail.com> wrote:
This is a good solution. Do I need to specify the original License etc? And what about a helper function such as stats:::n.knots? This will not appear in the manual of my package. Is it sufficient in this case to document the authorship in the source (and perhaps a README as you suggested)?
If the license is the same as your projects you just need the proper copyright notice. As Hadley suggests it is a good idea to also document the appropriate authorship in the Authors field in the DESCRIPTION as well. If the license is different but permissive than then it typically doesn't need go into DESCRIPTION or a separate LICENSE file but the permissive license text does usually need to either go into inst/COPYRIGHT or at the top of the relevant code file: https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html
That may be true for other open source projects, but that is not the interpretation that cran maintainers have used in the past. Hadley
Chief Scientist, RStudio http://had.co.nz/