There are 3 solutions. (1) You (get permission) to change the library to GPL. (2) You get permission to change the license of the R code to whatever license the library is released under. (3) you split the package.
You have investigated (1) and it does not work. I would suggest thinking about (2) provided the license of the library is decent. This is what we did with Rgraphviz some years ago; Graphviz itself is licensed under the Eclipse public license and there was no way I could get a company to change the license of that code. I would do whatever I can to avoid splitting the package. Best, Kasper On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 8:44 PM, David C Sterratt <david.c.sterr...@ed.ac.uk> wrote: > Dear all, > > I'd appreciate help with a licence conundrum I have with the geometry > package (https://davidcsterratt.github.io/geometry/) that I maintain. > > The geometry package contains some functions (e.g. convhulln(), > delaunayn()) that wrap the Qhull library (http://www.qhull.org), which > has its own, non-GPL, licence. The geometry package includes this source > code, and wraps it in C files that have GPL licence headers. > > The geometry package also has functions that are not derived from Qhull > code and which are licensed under GPL, including a number of functions > that are ports of the Matlab distmesh package, and some other useful > functions to do with triangulation and coordinate systems (e.g. > tsearch() and cart2bary()). > > I inherited this situation when I took over maintaining the package 8 > years ago, though I have added functions to both Qhull-derived and GPL > categories. > > In October last year I submitted the latest version of the geometry > package, which adds quite a bit of useful functionality: > https://github.com/davidcsterratt/geometry/blob/master/pkg/NEWS > > I received the following response from the CRAN maintainers: > > For the license. It is CRAN policy that a package has to have a single > license. Can you manage to convince all copyright hoders (e.g. of > Qhull) to relicense under GPL? > > I tried persuading the author of Qhull. He replied: > > There's only one license and that's the one included with the code > (COPYING.txt). Several years ago, I tried to clarify the license with > the Univ. of Minn. but had no success. So I think the best approach is > to keep the original license as is. It has not been an issue so far. > > At the same time as I wrote to the Qhull maintainer, I wrote to the CRAN > maintainers: > > I have written to the Qhull maintainer, but I doubt he will want to > change the license, since Qhull is used in proprietary software such > as MATLAB. Assuming this is the case, we'll have to create a new > package - I would need help with managing the change for dependent > packages. > > The CRAN maintainers replied: > > Please try to find out how this can work. > > In principle I could create a package containing only the functions > derived from Qhull (but still with GPL headers in the wrapper C files, > see e.g., > https://github.com/davidcsterratt/geometry/blob/ > master/pkg/src/Rconvhulln.c > But wouldn't this package still have to have two licenses, due to the > GPL headers? > > I don't want to start on any package splitting without having a plan > agreed that I know will be OK for CRAN. It would be quite a bit of work, > as there are a number of packages that depend on geometry, so I would > have to check all the revdeps for functions that they call in the > geometry package. I would have to then perhaps write wrapper functions > in the geometry package to make sure any functions moved to a new > package still worked when called from revdeps. > > I know the CRAN maintainers are busy, so any help from the list would be > much appreciated. > > Best wishes, > > David. > > -- > David C Sterratt, Senior Research Associate > Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics > University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, Scotland, > UK > http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/sterratt - tel: +44 131 651 1739 > > -- > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in > Scotland, with registration number SC005336. > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel