Licensing Blog

All that legal stuff…
Author

AR

Published

March 9, 2023

Frontmatter check Render rmarkdown

Prompt:

The DESCRIPTION file of a package contains the package’s meta information. Most of the fields in this file are quite straight forward: author, version number, and a short package description. When you call library(help="<package name>") for package <package name> you can see the contents of the DESCRIPTION file for that package (and some parts of the NAMESPACE file).

Read through Colin Fay’s (short) book on Licensing R

Write a blog post addressing the following questions:

Under what license does R operate? What is the license for ggplot2?

R is licensed as GNU General Public License. R as a package is licensed under GPL-2 | GPL-3. The ggplot2 license is MIT + file LICENSE.

What are the dependencies of the package you made?

library(lubridate, quietly = TRUE) GPL (>= 2) library(tabulizer) MIT + file LICENSE library(tidyverse, quietly = TRUE) MIT + file LICENSE library(stringr) MIT + file LICENSE

Are packages we used.

Under which license should this blog post be published? Make sure that you are using an appropriate license. I would use MIT + file LICENSE because it does not matter if someone modifies anything.

Can I publish an R package on CRAN under an MIT license when I have a dependency on a package that is licensed under GPL-3?

I would say yes you can publish a package on CRAN under an MIT license but it might not be technically following the rules.

The ‘harping’ questions:

  • Is it legal to publish an R package on CRAN under an MIT license when I have a dependency on a package that is licensed under GPL-3? No?
  • Is it illegal to publish an R package on CRAN under an MIT license when I have a dependency on a package that is licensed under GPL-3? No?
  • Is it a copyright infringement to publish an R package on CRAN under an MIT license when I have a dependency on a package that is licensed under GPL-3? Yes
  • Can I publish an R package on CRAN under an MIT license when I have a dependency on a package that is licensed under GPL-3 without infringing copyright? No

The licensing was a little confusing. It almost sounds like it isn’t very explicitly defined so it isn’t legal, but also not illegal. I’m not sure I understood the licensing very well.