[R-pkg-devel] license for package
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
On 29 May 2015 at 11:44, Pieter Eendebak wrote: | Dear developers, | | How can I specify the license for my package when my package includes some | code with other licenses (and different copyright holders). In particular: | | - my package is BSD 2-clause | - my packages in includes MPL-2 code (Eigen math library) Narrow comment: If you do 'LinkingTo: RcppEigen' you do not need to include the Eigen headers yourself.
This is a good suggestion. I works for my code, so I can now leave out Eigen for the source of the R package.
| - my package includes some MIT code (different author) You cannot relicense code by other people. Their license stays. I agree, but still I would like to be able to include source code from
other people (as long as licenses are compatible). To be concrete: how can one distribute a file like msstdint.h (https://code.google.com/p/msinttypes/) within an R package and have the licenses properly set in the DESCRIPTION file?
You have some choice in how you license _your_ code in the package. That said, license "cross-products" have conflicts, but licensing your code under BSD-2 in the context of the GPL-2'ed R / MIT'ed other parts should be fine. See the links in Thomas's post for more. Lastly, in many cases [eg when you link against libR], the "aggregate work" will be under GPL (>= 2) anyway. But within the "aggregate work" the code you added can be under a different license (as long as it is compatible). Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org