Dear all,

from "Writing R Extensions":

The string ‘Unlimited’, meaning that there are no restrictions on distribution or use other than those imposed by relevant laws (including copyright laws).

If a package license restricts a base license (where permitted, e.g., using GPL-3 or AGPL-3 with an attribution clause), the additional terms should be placed in file LICENSE (or LICENCE), and the string ‘+ file LICENSE’ (or ‘+ file LICENCE’, respectively) should be appended to the
corresponding individual license specification.
...
Please note in particular that “Public domain” is not a valid license, since it is not recognized in some jurisdictions."

So perhaps you aim for
License: Unlimited

Best,
Uwe Ligges




On 14.01.2017 07:53, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 13/01/2017 3:21 PM, Charles Geyer wrote:

I would like the unlicense (http://unlicense.org/) added to R
licenses.  Does anyone else think that worthwhile?


That's a question for you to answer, not to ask.  Who besides you thinks
that it's a good license for open source software?

If it is recognized by the OSF or FSF or some other authority as a FOSS
license, then CRAN would probably also recognize it.  If not, then CRAN
doesn't have the resources to evaluate it and so is unlikely to recognize
it.

Unlicense is listed in https://spdx.org/licenses/

Debian does include software "licensed" like this, and seems to think
this is one way (not the only one) of declaring something to be
"public domain".  The first two examples I found:

https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/r/rasqal/copyright-0.9.29-1
https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/w/wiredtiger/copyright-2.6.1%2Bds-1

This follows the format explained in
https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-specification,
which does not explicitly include Unlicense, but does include CC0,
which AFAICT is meant to formally license something so that it is
equivalent to being in the public domain. R does include CC0 as a
shorthand (e.g., geoknife).

https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ says that

<quote>

Licenses currently found in Debian main include:

- ...
- ...
- public domain (not a license, strictly speaking)

</quote>

The equivalent for CRAN would probably be something like "License:
public-domain + file LICENSE".

-Deepayan

Duncan Murdoch


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