[R-pkg-devel] Licensing of an R package

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 10:28 AM, Chris Brien <Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au>
wrote:
Hi Barry,

Ideally, I would prefer that my package remain open source.

However, I have considered MIT and the two BSD licenses and I understand
that they are permissive. I have not ruled out using one of them.

The thing about those licenses is that I have not been able to find
anything on the web about linking a proprietary and free package under
those licenses. The information is not nearly as comprehensive as it is for
GPL licenses.

    You're not distributing the proprietary package, and the MIT license
doesn't restrict use in any way, including linking with proprietary
software. So you can MIT-license your code and it remains open source, can
link with EvilCorps `bar` package, and it guarantees your (c) notice and
the MIT license will be preserved on copies of your code (it can't be
re-licensed under a different license).
The problem as I see it is that they are GPL compatible and so I do not
understand how that can be the case and that you can apply the licence in
my situation.

GPL-compatible means you can put MIT-license code together with GPL-license
code and distribute the combination *under the GPL license*. This doesn't
work the other way round - you can't bring GPL-licensed code into an
MIT-license codebase and distribute that under MIT-license!

Interestingly GNU doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of a "MIT
License" although OSI does. To GNU, the "MIT LIcense" is a number of
possible licenses, and this might be why CRAN insist on inclusion of the
license file itself with anything branded "MIT License":

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Barry
I agree that to write your own license is rather daunting. I would much
prefer to use a pre-existing license.

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers,

  Chris

From: b.rowlingson at gmail.com [mailto:b.rowlingson at gmail.com] On Behalf Of
Barry Rowlingson
Sent: Friday, 19 January 2018 8:00 PM
To: Chris Brien
Cc: r-package-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] Licensing of an R package

Chris,

 you've not said what *you* would like the license for your software to
do. You could release the software under a "public domain", "no rights
reserved" style license, and then if people want to link it with
proprietary materials then nothing can stop them. But it wouldn't stop
people commercialising (what was) your code, modifying it, re-releasing it
as binary and without source, and so on.

 Once you've decided which things you want to permit or restrict under
your license then you can see if there's a pre-existing one that matches
your requirements, or whether you have to write one yourself! Good luck
with that option!

 https://opensource.org/license/MIT is one of the more permissive open
source licenses - check the others on there for more info.

Barry

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 8:31 AM, Chris Brien <Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au<
mailto:Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au>> wrote:
Dear list members,

I have come to realize that my understanding of free software licensing
was somewhat na?ve. The problem is that I now find that, in spite of
spending quite a bit of time reading about various licenses on the web, I
have been unable to identify a suitable license for the situation that I
have with one of my packages.

I am solely responsible for the development of my package, `foo' say.
However, most functions in `foo' call functions from a proprietary package,
`bar' say , the latter not being available from an online software
repository and consisting of R functions that call routines in a library.
That is, `foo' enhances `bar'.

I had thought that a GPL licence was appropriate because (1) `foo' is free
software and (ii) I do not distribute `bar' with `foo'. That is, I am
distributing only free software.  However, I have come to understand that
this is not the case because a free software package linked with a
proprietary package does not satisfy the requirements to be GPL.

I have found it difficult to work out a license that might cover my
package because much of the discussion online covers cases that are the
opposite of mine i.e. cases where `foo' is proprietary and `bar' is
freeware. I can appreciate why this needs to be avoided.

I can also understand that a disadvantage of what I am doing is that it
tends to entrench the use of such software. While I agree that it is
desirable that `bar' be replaced with free software, unfortunately `bar'
has functionality that is currently infeasible to replace with free
software. At least I am not profiting from the enhancements that I have
made.

I am hoping that someone more experienced in software development and
licensing issues can suggest a license type that might be suitable for
`foo' such that at least the enhancements that it incorporates remain
`free'?

Cheers,

  Chris Brien

Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Statistics
-----
Phenomics and Bioinformatics Research Centre
University of South Australia
GPO Box 2471
ADELAIDE  5001  South Australia
Phone:  +61 8 8302 5535<tel:%2B61%208%208302%205535>   Fax:  +61 8 8302
5785<tel:%2B61%208%208302%205785>
Email:   Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au<mailto:Chris.Brien at unisa.edu.au>
WEB page:  <http://people.unisa.edu.au/Chris.Brien>
CRICOS No 00121B

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[R-pkg-devel] Licensing of an R package

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