[R-pkg-devel] Licenses

On Oct 22, 2020, at 11:19 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com> wrote:

On Oct 22, 2020, at 10:21 AM, Kevin R. Coombes <kevin.r.coombes at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am developing a package and getting a NOTE from R CMD check about licenses and ultimate dependencies on a restrictive license, which I can't figure out how to fix.

My package imports flowCore, which has an Artistic-2.0 license.
But flowCore imports cytolib, which has a license from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center that prohibits commercial use.

I tried using the same license as flowCore, but still get the NOTE. Does anyone know which licenses can be used to be compatible with the Fred Hutch license? Or can I just do what flowCore apparently does and ignore the NOTE?

Thanks,
  Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I have not looked at BioC's licensing requirements, but presumably, they are ok with the non-commercial use restrictions placed on users of cytolib, thus also on flowCore.

If you want your package to be on CRAN, those restrictions on users are not allowed by CRAN's policy:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html

"Such packages are not permitted to require (e.g., by specifying in ?Depends?, ?Imports? or ?LinkingTo? fields) directly or indirectly a package or external software which restricts users or usage."


Thus, you would seem to need to make a decision on hosting your package on CRAN, but without the need to import from flowCore/cytolib, or consider hosting your package on BioC, with the attendant restrictions on commercial use.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

Well....

Now that I look at:

   https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db

there are a few licenses listed there that do place restrictions on commercial use.

These include some Creative Commons Non-Commercial use variants and the ACM license.

Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict with the CRAN policy that I quoted above?

Anyone with an ability to comment?