Thanks to all for your helpful replies. It seems reasonable to consider that the whole package is indeed licensed under GPL >= 3, and I can therefore remove the LICENSE file. The Qhull COPYING.txt notice is included in the inst/doc directory, as required by the Qhull licence, so I think all should be OK.
If the CRAN maintainers are happy with this proposal, that will resolve a major R-packaging headache, so thanks again. Best wishes, David. On Wed 11 Apr 2018 at 16:58 BST, Martyn Plummer <plumm...@iarc.fr> wrote: > I agree with Brian. This type of license is classified by the Free > Software Foundation as "lax" or "permissive" because it does not > prevent incorporation of the code into proprietary software. > > Here is what Richard Stallman has to say: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ > license-compatibility.en.html > > "[L]ax licenses are usually compatible with any copyleft license. In > the combined program, the parts that came in under lax licenses still > carry them, and the combined program as a whole carries the copyleft > license." > > Hence you can license your package under the GPL. > > Martyn > > On Tue, 2018-04-10 at 08:14 -0500, Brian G. Peterson wrote: >> I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see why the entire package can't be >> released under GPL, while also respecting the QHull license for the >> QHull code and the derived QHull portions. >> >> Many existing R packages released under GPL, and R itself, include BSD >> and MIT licensed code. >> >> The QHull license is a very permissive license, basically BSD or MIT- >> like in its permissions. >> >> BSD and MIT code may be included in GPL'd code, as long as its license >> (inclusion of the copyright notice, etc.) is also included where >> required. >> >> GPL applies to the entire work, in this case the R package. I think >> you should discuss this with the CRAN maintainers and release the >> package under GPL. >> >> Regards, >> >> Brian >> -- 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