Hi all, Just adding my experience to this thread as a cautionary example against the notion that it should be no problem to release a package under GPL-3 if it only calls functions from packages released under GPL-2.
Up to 2017, my afex package (which depended on several GPL-2 packages) was released under GPL-3. However, then an over-eager debian user reported this as a violation of the GPL, see here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800891 As a consequence, Debian suspended hosting the corresponding binary package (r-cran-afex) until I changed my license to GPL (≥ 2). I in principle agree with both Duncan and Hadley position, but if someone more powerful (in this case the Debian package admin) has other opinions there was not much I could do. Best, Henrik Am Do., 11. Sept. 2025 um 23:32 Uhr schrieb Hadley Wickham < [email protected]>: > On Mon, Sep 8, 2025 at 2:08 PM Duncan Murdoch <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > On 2025-09-08 10:55 a.m., Ilmari Tamminen wrote: > > > I would like to release my R code under GPL-3. The code depends on a > > package (lme4) that itself uses "GPL >= 2", but which has upstream > > dependencies (minqa, numDeriv, rbibutils) that are GPL-2 only. According > > to what I've read (see below), GPL-2 and GPL-3 are incompatible. Are the > > GPL-2 upstream licenses a problem for my GPL-3 R code? If so, are there > > recommended ways of resolving this? > > > > My understanding is that the licenses of other packages are only > > relevant if you are incorporating their code into yours and would like > > to release the combined work. > > > > If your code uses some other package but you are not distributing the > > other package then their license doesn't affect your package. > > > > For example, many packages (including R itself) are written to use > > Windows functions, but since they don't distribute copies of those > > functions the fact that Windows isn't open source doesn't matter. > > > > This is my belief too, and I've written a bit about it at > https://r-pkgs.org/license.html#code-you-use > > Hadley > > -- > http://hadley.nz > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel > -- Dr. Henrik Singmann Associate Professor, Experimental Psychology University College London (UCL), UK http://singmann.org [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
