I do not want to make many general comments about licenses in public, as
this is a very difficult matter and I am not a lawyer.
But let me cite from the CRAN policies:
"Packages with licenses not listed at
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/licenses/license.db will
generally not be accepted. "
Further, I see in the discussions that you talked about depending on a
software with a non-FOSS license. The CRAN team's point of view, for
short, is:
A package with a FOSS license cannot strictly depend on a
package/software that is non-FOSS. Obviously, the FOSS package cannot be
used under its own license conditions in that case.
Best,
Uwe Ligges
On 23.10.2020 14:25, Ege Rubak wrote:
Hi all,
My two cents are below Marc's summary here:
On Thu, 2020-10-22 at 20:33 -0400, Marc Schwartz wrote:
Right now, the interpretation, without further clarification from
CRAN, would be, it is ok for a package to be on CRAN with license
based usage restrictions included (e.g. for non-commercial use), but
a package on CRAN, irrespective of it's own license, cannot
"interact" with other packages that do have restrictions...which
seems inconsistent.
It depends a bit what is meant by "interact". Years ago `spatstat` used
`gpclib` with a non-commercial license to do polygonal operations. The
solution was to list `gpclib` in `Suggests` and require the user to
make an active choice to use this piece of software with a warning
about non-commercial use. I find this to be an OK solution in lack of
completely free alternatives. These days `gpclib` is still on CRAN and
only has reverse `Suggests` and `Enhances`, so that seems fairly
consistent.
In the long run this was unsatisfatory and our specific problem was
solved by Adrian Baddeley by making the `polyclip` package.
Kind regards,
Ege
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