Micheal,
Keep in mind that the author of the package can give you a copy under any conditions
that they choose, they are not bound by the GPL. Simply send you code from their own
source which is "upstream" of the GPL copy. (The copy out on CRAN propogates strictly via
GPL however). You could for instance start a new package de novo.
This may or may not make sense in your case, but I wanted to point out the
flexibility.
A version of rpart has twice been bundled into commercial products via this route,
where the user didn't want to be under the GPL. None in the last 8-10 years; as Brian
Ripley's and my contributions to rpart are now far too comingled to define a non-gpl code
base. I'll also note that in both those cases my employer took the quite defensible
position that contributions to a for profit company are not free of charge.
On 03/05/2014 05:00 AM, r-devel-requ...@r-project.org wrote:
There is a CRAN package licensed just as "GPL", say, XX, I want to use
in a book.
But I've needed to modify the package to make it do what I need for
expository purposes.
The package author(s) are amenable to my modifications, but probably
unlikely to
incorporate them into the CRAN version any time soon.
Am I allowed, under GPL, to create a new version of the package, say
XX2, in a
public repository such as R-Forge or github? I would, of course,
maintain their
authorship, though perhaps take over the maintainer role. For my
purposes in
the book, I don't necessarily need to release my version to CRAN; just a
public repo
a reader could download from.
-Michael
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