On 6 November 2016 at 09:11, Lenth, Russell V wrote: | A correction and clarification... | | It is MY package's GPL-2 license that is being violated by the other package -- not its GPL-3 license.
No, let's stop here. I don't think that is legally (or conceptually !!) possible. Your code, your repo, ... are all self-contained and "fine". But, and the big but, is that GPL-3 stipulates no mixing with GPL-2. | Let me lay it out with some generic names: | * The 'foo' package specifies a GPL-2 license | * The 'bar' package depends on 'foo', but specifies a GPL-3 license. That violates foo's GPL-2 license. "violate" is IMHO not the correct terms. More like "prohibits use" per terms in GPL-3. See eg https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html | More details: | * 'foo' provides a particular type of analysis embodied in a function named 'manchoo', | and provides methods for various classes. | * 'bar' provides an S3 method for 'manchoo', via statements like this in its NAMESPACE file: | importFrom(foo, manchoo) | S3method(manchoo, bar) | * The developer of 'foo' welcomes such expanded availability of 'manchoo' methods. | | So there seem to be two ways to resolve this: | 1. The developer of 'foo' changes its license to GPL-3 (does that indeed resolve the license issue?) Yes as said yesterday. "GPL (>= 2)" aka "GPL-2 | GPL-3" does. You can of course use _only_ GPL-3 (but there are a lot of people around R who keep GPL-2, including R itself (!!) -- see 'license()' as the startup prompt suggests and numerous packages written by R Core and others). | -- OR -- | 2. The developer of 'bar' removes the dependency on 'foo', by not importing 'manchoo' or its | S3method; instead, it simply exports the function 'manchoo.bar' and moves 'foo' to Suggests Maybe -- but moving to Suggests, as easy as it seems, is probably not a real solution as you still have co-use. Spirit of the law, letter of the law. In any event that applies only to 'bar', and you are 'foo'. Dirk | Thanks for any suggestions | | Russ | | -----Original Message----- | From: Lenth, Russell V | Sent: Saturday, November 5, 2016 9:28 PM | To: 'r-package-devel@r-project.org' <r-package-devel@r-project.org> | Subject: Relicense to GPL-3? | | Dear all, | | 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. This apparently causes an issue with the Debian packaging system, throwing that other package into the "unstable" category. | | 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 don't really understand why this isn't the other developer's problem and not mine. But on the other hand, I don't want to cause problems for others. The licensing stuff is hard for me to understand - in large part because of low motivation to dig into it; I really would rather think about providing better code and features than all sorts of legal gobble-de-gook. Nonetheless, I guess this stuff is important to some people (e.g., Debian) so I suppose I had better get it right. | | My decision to put GPL-2 in the first place was primarily expedience: it seemed like what people wanted. So is GPL-3 "better"? Do I risk anything by changing it? Do I risk anything by not changing it? How much does it matter, really? | | Thanks | | Russ | | Russell V. Lenth - Professor Emeritus | Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science The University of Iowa - Iowa City, IA 52242 USA Voice (319)335-0712 (Dept. office) - FAX (319)335-3017 | | ______________________________________________ | R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel -- 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