Because the common FOSS licenses are installed with R, CRAN asks you
to refer to those copies not distribute your own. See 'Writing R
Extensions'.
I agree that most R packages are lacking copyright statements (which
is a separate issue, and whose purpose varies by jurisdiction:
provided ownership is clear, they are not needed in the UK according
to an IP lawyer acquaintance of mine). For any 'public' R package the
authorship should be made clear: most often the Author: field in the
DESCRIPTION file suffices.
There is one issue which this thread has missed and may affect the
licence. If your package is pure R code and R acts as the
interpreter, the licence of R does not (according to most people) come
into play. If you start linking to R's internals via compiled code or
via .Internal calls, you may well be making a derivative work. See
for example
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL (which is
the GPL-3 FAQ, only one of the two licences available for R, and that
interpretation is not the only one).
On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Federico Calboli
<f.calb...@imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
The vast majority of CRAN libraries seem to be released under some sort of GPL
version. I never seen a license though.
You're right. The GNU people say "should":
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
---
You should also include a copy of the license itself somewhere in the
distribution of your program. All programs, whether they are released
under the GPL or LGPL, should include the text version of the GPL. In
GNU programs the license is usually in a file called COPYING.
---
But it seems you have to add a copyright and permission notice to every file:
---
Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two
elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such
as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying
permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of
the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).
---
I just picked one random R package from CRAN ("tgram") and it doesn't
comply (no copyright mention, no LICENSE file, just License: GPL (>=2)
in the DESCRIPTION). I suspect most of my own code doesn't comply
either. Told you I wasn't a lawyer...
Barry
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--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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