From ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de  Wed Jan 18 00:35:10 2017
From: ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de (Uwe Ligges)
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:35:10 +0100
Subject: [Rd] unlicense
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Message-ID: <a9b2554d-8b7e-06b5-8786-26d53e1971a5@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>



On 18.01.2017 00:13, Karl Millar wrote:
> Please don't use 'Unlimited' or 'Unlimited + ...'.
>
> Google's lawyers don't recognize 'Unlimited' as being open-source, so
> our policy doesn't allow us to use such packages due to lack of an
> acceptable license.  To our lawyers, 'Unlimited + file LICENSE' means
> something very different than it presumably means to Uwe.


Karl,

thanks for this comment. What we like to hear now is a suggestion what 
the maintainer is supposed to do to get what he aims at, as we already 
know that "freeware" does not work at all and was hard enough to get to 
the "Unlimited" options.

We have many CRAN requests asking for what they should write for 
"freeware". Can we get an opinion from your layers which standard 
license comes closest to what these maintainers probably aim at and will 
work more or less globally, i.e. not only in the US?

Best,
Uwe



> Thanks,
>
> Karl
>
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 12:10 AM, Uwe Ligges
> <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> from "Writing R Extensions":
>>
>> The string ?Unlimited?, meaning that there are no restrictions on
>> distribution or use other than those imposed by relevant laws (including
>> copyright laws).
>>
>> If a package license restricts a base license (where permitted, e.g., using
>> GPL-3 or AGPL-3 with an attribution clause), the additional terms should be
>> placed in file LICENSE (or LICENCE), and the string ?+ file LICENSE? (or ?+
>> file LICENCE?, respectively) should be appended to the
>> corresponding individual license specification.
>> ...
>> Please note in particular that ?Public domain? is not a valid license, since
>> it is not recognized in some jurisdictions."
>>
>> So perhaps you aim for
>> License: Unlimited
>>
>> Best,
>> Uwe Ligges
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 14.01.2017 07:53, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 13/01/2017 3:21 PM, Charles Geyer wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like the unlicense (http://unlicense.org/) added to R
>>>>> licenses.  Does anyone else think that worthwhile?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That's a question for you to answer, not to ask.  Who besides you thinks
>>>> that it's a good license for open source software?
>>>>
>>>> If it is recognized by the OSF or FSF or some other authority as a FOSS
>>>> license, then CRAN would probably also recognize it.  If not, then CRAN
>>>> doesn't have the resources to evaluate it and so is unlikely to recognize
>>>> it.
>>>
>>>
>>> Unlicense is listed in https://spdx.org/licenses/
>>>
>>> Debian does include software "licensed" like this, and seems to think
>>> this is one way (not the only one) of declaring something to be
>>> "public domain".  The first two examples I found:
>>>
>>> https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/r/rasqal/copyright-0.9.29-1
>>>
>>> https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/w/wiredtiger/copyright-2.6.1%2Bds-1
>>>
>>> This follows the format explained in
>>>
>>> https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-specification,
>>> which does not explicitly include Unlicense, but does include CC0,
>>> which AFAICT is meant to formally license something so that it is
>>> equivalent to being in the public domain. R does include CC0 as a
>>> shorthand (e.g., geoknife).
>>>
>>> https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ says that
>>>
>>> <quote>
>>>
>>> Licenses currently found in Debian main include:
>>>
>>> - ...
>>> - ...
>>> - public domain (not a license, strictly speaking)
>>>
>>> </quote>
>>>
>>> The equivalent for CRAN would probably be something like "License:
>>> public-domain + file LICENSE".
>>>
>>> -Deepayan
>>>
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
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>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
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>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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[Rd] unlicense
Uwe Ligges