The SystemRequirements: field of the DESCRIPTION file normally lists external dependencies whether free or non-free.
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Prof. John C Nash <nas...@uottawa.ca> wrote: > Subject: Non-GPL packages for R > > Packages that are not licensed in a way that permits re-distribution on > CRAN are frequently a source of comment and concern on R-help and other > lists. A good example of this problem is the Rdonlp2 package that has caused > a lot of annoyance for a number of optimization users in R. They are also an > issue for efforts like Dirk Eddelbuettel's cran2deb. > > There are, however, a number of circumstances where non-GPL equivalent > packages may be important to users. This can imply that users need to > both install an R package and one or more dependencies that must be > separately obtained and licensed. One such situation is where a new > program is still under development and the license is not clear, as in > the recent work we pursued with respect to Mike Powell's BOBYQA. We > wanted to verify if this were useful before we considered distribution, > and Powell had been offering copies of his code on request. Thus we > could experiment, but not redistribute. Recently Powell's approval to > redistribute has been obtained. > > We believe that it is important that non-redistributable codes be > excluded from CRAN, but that they could be available on a repository > such as r-forge. However, we would like to see a clearer indication of > the license status on r-forge. One possibility is an inclusion of a > statement and/or icon indicating such status e.g., green for GPL or > equivalent, amber for uncertain, red for restricted. Another may be a > division of directories, so that GPL-equivalent packages are kept > separate from uncertain or restricted licensed ones. > > We welcome comments and suggestions on both the concept and the > technicalities. > > John Nash & Ravi Varadhan > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel