Dear list members, I have come to realize that my understanding of free software licensing was somewhat naïve. The problem is that I now find that, in spite of spending quite a bit of time reading about various licenses on the web, I have been unable to identify a suitable license for the situation that I have with one of my packages.
I am solely responsible for the development of my package, `foo' say. However, most functions in `foo' call functions from a proprietary package, `bar' say , the latter not being available from an online software repository and consisting of R functions that call routines in a library. That is, `foo' enhances `bar'. I had thought that a GPL licence was appropriate because (1) `foo' is free software and (ii) I do not distribute `bar' with `foo'. That is, I am distributing only free software. However, I have come to understand that this is not the case because a free software package linked with a proprietary package does not satisfy the requirements to be GPL. I have found it difficult to work out a license that might cover my package because much of the discussion online covers cases that are the opposite of mine i.e. cases where `foo' is proprietary and `bar' is freeware. I can appreciate why this needs to be avoided. I can also understand that a disadvantage of what I am doing is that it tends to entrench the use of such software. While I agree that it is desirable that `bar' be replaced with free software, unfortunately `bar' has functionality that is currently infeasible to replace with free software. At least I am not profiting from the enhancements that I have made. I am hoping that someone more experienced in software development and licensing issues can suggest a license type that might be suitable for `foo' such that at least the enhancements that it incorporates remain `free'? Cheers, Chris Brien Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Statistics ----- Phenomics and Bioinformatics Research Centre University of South Australia GPO Box 2471 ADELAIDE 5001 South Australia Phone: +61 8 8302 5535 Fax: +61 8 8302 5785 Email: chris.br...@unisa.edu.au WEB page: <http://people.unisa.edu.au/Chris.Brien> CRICOS No 00121B ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
