On 6 November 2016 at 02:28, Lenth, Russell V wrote: | I received an email from a user telling me that another package that | depends on my package is licensed GPL(>=3), whereas mine is licensed GPL-2; | and that therefore, the other package is in violation of its GPL-3 license.
That is apparently so, but most easily fixed by relicensing as "GPL (>= 2)" which CRAN expands to "GPL-2 | GPL-3" as you can see on _many_ CRAN package pages. For what it is worth, I was in the same situation with package 'digest' which was created so long ago that its license was also "GPL-2" (whereas most my other packages tend to be "GPL (>= 2)" ). I was asked by a commercial downstream redistributor to change the license, contacted all eighteen (18) other copyright holders (as the package had a number of patches and pull request) as one has to. By the time the final 'ok' was given the original was request was withdrawn after some refactoring. I still went ahead and changed this in the sources which will be reflected in the next upload. See https://github.com/eddelbuettel/digest/issues/36 for the full thread. | This apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing | that other package into the "unstable" category. That is confused. "Unstable" is the normal staging area for new uploads, and presumes nobody has an issue with the license. | Moreover, the correspondent asks me if I would consider changing the | license for my package. To what is not specified, but I guess it would be | to GPL-3. I'd say "GPL (>= 2)" | I don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and not mine. To the license lawyers, your package imposes a constraint by being GPL-2 not allowing use with eg GPL-3. Hope this helps, I am sure others will chip in too. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel