On 22/10/2020 12:56 p.m., Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Oct 22, 2020, at 12:12 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 22/10/2020 11:55 a.m., Marc Schwartz wrote:
On Oct 22, 2020, at 11:19 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote:
On Oct 22, 2020, at 10:21 AM, Kevin R. Coombes <kevin.r.coom...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
I am developing a package and getting a NOTE from R CMD check about licenses
and ultimate dependencies on a restrictive license, which I can't figure out
how to fix.
My package imports flowCore, which has an Artistic-2.0 license.
But flowCore imports cytolib, which has a license from the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Center that prohibits commercial use.
I tried using the same license as flowCore, but still get the NOTE. Does anyone
know which licenses can be used to be compatible with the Fred Hutch license?
Or can I just do what flowCore apparently does and ignore the NOTE?
Thanks,
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
I have not looked at BioC's licensing requirements, but presumably, they are ok
with the non-commercial use restrictions placed on users of cytolib, thus also
on flowCore.
If you want your package to be on CRAN, those restrictions on users are not
allowed by CRAN's policy:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html
"Such packages are not permitted to require (e.g., by specifying in ‘Depends’,
‘Imports’ or ‘LinkingTo’ fields) directly or indirectly a package or external software
which restricts users or usage."
Thus, you would seem to need to make a decision on hosting your package on
CRAN, but without the need to import from flowCore/cytolib, or consider hosting
your package on BioC, with the attendant restrictions on commercial use.
Regards,
Marc Schwartz
Well....
Now that I look at:
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db
there are a few licenses listed there that do place restrictions on commercial
use.
These include some Creative Commons Non-Commercial use variants and the ACM
license.
Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict with the
CRAN policy that I quoted above?
Anyone with an ability to comment?
Presumably CRAN would not accept the non-FOSS licenses that are listed in license.db, but
R could still do computations on them, as described in ?library in the
"Licenses" section.
Duncan Murdoch
Duncan,
That is a reasonable distinction.
However, upon searching CRAN with available.packages(), I came up with a list
of packages that do include Non-Commercial restrictions, including CC BY-NC*
and ACM licenses. There may be others that I missed visually scanning the
output.
There also appear to be some conflicts/inconsistencies with the 'License_restricts_use' field entry and the
'License' field in some cases, where, for example, most that have "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0" as the license,
have "NA" as the entry for restricted use, rather than "yes".
I am not going to list them here, as I don't want to pick on any particular
package, but this does seem to point to an inconsistency between packages that
are hosted on CRAN and the articulated policy...
Perhaps those packages were accepted before this became a policy, and
now that others depend on them, it would be too disruptive to remove
them, and users are warned via the 'License_restricts_use' field entry.
Why does it sometimes contain errors? That I don't know, other than
blaming it on Murphy's Law.
Duncan Murdoch
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