[R-pkg-devel] Relicense to GPL-3?

[Lenth, Russell V]

Dear all,

I received an email from a user telling me that another package that depends on 
my package is licensed GPL(>=3), whereas mine is licensed GPL-2; and that 
therefore, the other package is in violation of its GPL-3 license. This 
apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing that 
other package into the "unstable" category.

Moreover, the correspondent asks me if I would consider changing the license 
for my package. To what is not specified, but I guess it would be to GPL-3.

I don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and not 
mine. But on the other hand, I don't want to cause problems for others. The 
licensing stuff is hard for me to understand - in large part because of low 
motivation to dig into it; I really would rather think about providing better 
code and features than all sorts of legal gobble-de-gook. Nonetheless, I guess 
this stuff is important to some people (e.g., Debian) so I suppose I had better 
get it right.

My decision to put GPL-2 in the first place was primarily expedience: it seemed 
like what people wanted. So is GPL-3 "better"? Do I risk anything by changing 
it? Do I risk anything by not changing it? How much does it matter, really?

Thanks

Russ

Russell V. Lenth  -  Professor Emeritus
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science   
The University of Iowa  -  Iowa City, IA 52242  USA   
Voice (319)335-0712 (Dept. office)  -  FAX (319)335-3017

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Re: [R-pkg-devel] Relicense to GPL-3?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 November 2016 at 02:28, Lenth, Russell V wrote:
| I received an email from a user telling me that another package that
| depends on my package is licensed GPL(>=3), whereas mine is licensed GPL-2;
| and that therefore, the other package is in violation of its GPL-3 license.  

That is apparently so, but most easily fixed by relicensing as "GPL (>= 2)"
which CRAN expands to "GPL-2 | GPL-3" as you can see on _many_ CRAN package 
pages.

For what it is worth, I was in the same situation with package 'digest' which
was created so long ago that its license was also "GPL-2" (whereas most my
other packages tend to be "GPL (>= 2)" ).  I was asked by a commercial
downstream redistributor to change the license, contacted all eighteen (18)
other copyright holders (as the package had a number of patches and pull
request) as one has to.  By the time the final 'ok' was given the original
was request was withdrawn after some refactoring.  I still went ahead and
changed this in the sources which will be reflected in the next upload. See
https://github.com/eddelbuettel/digest/issues/36 for the full thread.

| This apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing
| that other package into the "unstable" category. 

That is confused. "Unstable" is the normal staging area for new uploads, and
presumes nobody has an issue with the license. 

| Moreover, the correspondent asks me if I would consider changing the
| license for my package. To what is not specified, but I guess it would be
| to GPL-3.

I'd say "GPL (>= 2)"

| I don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and 
not mine.

To the license lawyers, your package imposes a constraint by being GPL-2 not
allowing use with eg GPL-3.

Hope this helps, I am sure others will chip in too.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org

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