On 22/10/2020 11:55 a.m., Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Oct 22, 2020, at 11:19 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at me.com>
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?
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:
?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.
These include some Creative Commons Non-Commercial use variants and the
Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict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?
Presumably CRAN would not accept the non-FOSS licenses that are listed
in license.db, but R could still do computations on them, as described
in ?library in the "Licenses" section.
Duncan Murdoch