[R-pkg-devel] Possible open-source license incompatibilities within R packages
Hi all, Just adding my experience to this thread as a cautionary example against the notion that it should be no problem to release a package under GPL-3 if it only calls functions from packages released under GPL-2. Up to 2017, my afex package (which depended on several GPL-2 packages) was released under GPL-3. However, then an over-eager debian user reported this as a violation of the GPL, see here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800891 As a consequence, Debian suspended hosting the corresponding binary package (r-cran-afex) until I changed my license to GPL (? 2). I in principle agree with both Duncan and Hadley position, but if someone more powerful (in this case the Debian package admin) has other opinions there was not much I could do. Best, Henrik Am Do., 11. Sept. 2025 um 23:32 Uhr schrieb Hadley Wickham < h.wickham at gmail.com>:
On Mon, Sep 8, 2025 at 2:08?PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
On 2025-09-08 10:55 a.m., Ilmari Tamminen wrote:
I would like to release my R code under GPL-3. The code depends on a
package (lme4) that itself uses "GPL >= 2", but which has upstream dependencies (minqa, numDeriv, rbibutils) that are GPL-2 only. According to what I've read (see below), GPL-2 and GPL-3 are incompatible. Are the GPL-2 upstream licenses a problem for my GPL-3 R code? If so, are there recommended ways of resolving this? My understanding is that the licenses of other packages are only relevant if you are incorporating their code into yours and would like to release the combined work. If your code uses some other package but you are not distributing the other package then their license doesn't affect your package. For example, many packages (including R itself) are written to use Windows functions, but since they don't distribute copies of those functions the fact that Windows isn't open source doesn't matter.
This is my belief too, and I've written a bit about it at https://r-pkgs.org/license.html#code-you-use Hadley -- http://hadley.nz [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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Dr. Henrik Singmann Associate Professor, Experimental Psychology University College London (UCL), UK http://singmann.org [[alternative HTML version deleted]]