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[R-pkg-devel] Extending MIT software

5 messages · Thomas Petzoldt, Neal Fultz, Gábor Csárdi +1 more

#
When developing a new package we want to have a license attributed to that
package.  That said, I am a little confused how one would approach the MIT
license.  I am working on a package that extends upon another library that
has the MIT license.  I know that I need to create a LICENSE file with YEAR
and COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

My question is, would the copyright holder be just the authors for this
given R package or a combination of the R package authors and the original
library authors?

Regards,
Charles
#
Hi,

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, the MIT license allows 
re-licensing of derived work under the GPL.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

So what speaks against releasing your derived work under the GPL >= 2?

Thomas
On 28.05.2015 17:48, Charles Determan wrote:

  
    
#
IANAL, but if you are just importing or depending on another package, you
shouldn't need to worry about this. If you
copied their code into your own package, you should probably rethink your
approach.

At my job, several of my coworkers had copy/pasted code from stack
overflow, which carries a CC license. This is
hypothetically a problem if anyone ever tried to buy our code base or
company. To clean it up, I moved all of the functions
 into a separate stackoverflow package which had the correct license and
attribution.




On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Charles Determan <cdetermanjr at gmail.com>
wrote:

  
  
#
IANAL, too, but if you are indeed extending (i.e. embedding or
copying) another package, then you need to put all copyright holders
into the LICENSE file.

In the individual files, you can explain who has the copyright for
what. If you don't change the copied files at all, that is simple,
just add yourself as copyright holder to the new files you create.

Gabor

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Charles Determan
<cdetermanjr at gmail.com> wrote:
#
Thank you Thomas, I guess there is nothing, that I am aware of, that
prevents me from releasing with GPL >= 2 but I wanted to get some insights
as to what would be a best practice.  I prefer to give as much credit as
possible where it is do.

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Thomas Petzoldt <
Thomas.Petzoldt at tu-dresden.de> wrote: