> On Oct 22, 2020, at 12:12 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 22/10/2020 11:55 a.m., Marc Schwartz wrote: >>> On Oct 22, 2020, at 11:19 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote: >>> >>> On Oct 22, 2020, at 10:21 AM, Kevin R. Coombes <kevin.r.coom...@gmail.com> >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> I am developing a package and getting a NOTE from R CMD check about >>>> licenses and ultimate dependencies on a restrictive license, which I can't >>>> figure out how to fix. >>>> >>>> My package imports flowCore, which has an Artistic-2.0 license. >>>> But flowCore imports cytolib, which has a license from the Fred Hutchinson >>>> Cancer Center that prohibits commercial use. >>>> >>>> I tried using the same license as flowCore, but still get the NOTE. Does >>>> anyone know which licenses can be used to be compatible with the Fred >>>> Hutch license? Or can I just do what flowCore apparently does and ignore >>>> the NOTE? >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> Kevin >>> >>> >>> Hi Kevin, >>> >>> I have not looked at BioC's licensing requirements, but presumably, they >>> are ok with the non-commercial use restrictions placed on users of cytolib, >>> thus also on flowCore. >>> >>> If you want your package to be on CRAN, those restrictions on users are not >>> allowed by CRAN's policy: >>> >>> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html >>> >>> "Such packages are not permitted to require (e.g., by specifying in >>> ‘Depends’, ‘Imports’ or ‘LinkingTo’ fields) directly or indirectly a >>> package or external software which restricts users or usage." >>> >>> >>> Thus, you would seem to need to make a decision on hosting your package on >>> CRAN, but without the need to import from flowCore/cytolib, or consider >>> hosting your package on BioC, with the attendant restrictions on commercial >>> use. >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Marc Schwartz >> Well.... >> Now that I look at: >> https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db >> there are a few licenses listed there that do place restrictions on >> commercial use. >> These include some Creative Commons Non-Commercial use variants and the ACM >> license. >> Is the license DB file out of date, or is there an apparent conflict with >> the CRAN policy that I quoted above? >> Anyone with an ability to comment? > > Presumably CRAN would not accept the non-FOSS licenses that are listed in > license.db, but R could still do computations on them, as described in > ?library in the "Licenses" section. > > Duncan Murdoch
Duncan, That is a reasonable distinction. However, upon searching CRAN with available.packages(), I came up with a list of packages that do include Non-Commercial restrictions, including CC BY-NC* and ACM licenses. There may be others that I missed visually scanning the output. There also appear to be some conflicts/inconsistencies with the 'License_restricts_use' field entry and the 'License' field in some cases, where, for example, most that have "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0" as the license, have "NA" as the entry for restricted use, rather than "yes". I am not going to list them here, as I don't want to pick on any particular package, but this does seem to point to an inconsistency between packages that are hosted on CRAN and the articulated policy... Regards, Marc ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
