Dear CRAN administrators, following a license review of the locfit R package helped in 2013 by its current maintainer [1], we concluded that:
- The original C source code of locfit had a README file where the copyright holders gave a license that forbids to redistribute the work for a fee, and that forbids to benchmark the code against other algorithms, and of course, forbids to remove the license itself[1,2]. - When the locfit R package was initially submitted by one of its authors, the README file was omitted. - Nevertheless, there is nothing that indicates that the license does not apply, as the copyright statements that remain directly refer to the README file. For redistributors such as Debian or Fedora, which only include Free software, the license of locfit C code also precludes redistribution because it is not Free. Moreover, for binary redistribution by third parties, the license of the C code is not compatible with the license of the R code (GPL-2+). Unfortunately, an increasing number of CRAN or Bioconductor package depend directly or transitively on locfit, which is a problem for us. We would like to clarify the license of locfit and if necessary to convince the authors to use alternatives. Our first question to you is if you could clarify what, in your point of view, is the license of the locfit package that CRAN distributes. During the initial submitssion to CRAN, did you have some explicit comments from the authors (who are not the sole copyright holders) that the C code was relicensed to the GPL2+ license, as the DESCRIPTION file might suggest ? Did the original submitters comment on the absent README file ? Then, if the license of locfit is not clearly GPL, can CRAN add (or ask the maintainer) to add back the original license in the soure directory of the C code, and reflect it in the README ? Best regards, [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=731599#27 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080925025140/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/project/locfit/index.html [3] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/locfit/index.html (Please note that the bug address CCed is publicly archived) Charles Plessy and Andreas Tille, for the Debian Med project.
