[ please CC me as I'm not in d-legal@ ] So, today I discovered [0] that R-project has some polices regarding licenses [1]. In particular they have one regarding the MIT license [2]. This needs to go together with their extensions manuals [3].
Read together they say that if you have an R module you want to license
under MIT (which is really Expat) you have to:
* Add a line with "License: MIT + file LICENSE" in the DESCRIPTION file
* Add a LICENSE file with only (and they are explicit on the "only") 2
lines:
YEAR: <years of the copyright claim>
COPYRIGHT HOLDER: <name/surname/email, etc>
period.
Now, the Expat/MIT license (in particular the one present at [2] have
quite a clear statement:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
that requires the whole MIT license to be reported verbatim in every
release and copy of code covered by it.
But according to the R policy, R extensions do not, and the only
reference to the MIT license is the single word "MIT" in the DESCRIPTION
file.
This seems to have been accepted by the ftp-masters, as there are at
least 11 packages [4] in this condition already in the archive. I
should admin that with our packaging the distribution of these piece of
software is ok, as we add a copy of license in the debian copyright
file.
Still, I think the way the R project distributes MIT-licensed stuff is
not ok.
What do you think? Am I seeing a problem that actually isn't?
Thanks in advance.
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=818622#25
[1] https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/
[2] https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/MIT
[3] https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Licensing
[4] found by looking up 'path:debian/copyright License: MIT' in
codesearch.d.n and grepping the results for packages named /r-cran/
--
regards,
Mattia Rizzolo
GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18 4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540 .''`.
more about me: http://mapreri.org : :' :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia `-
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