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.