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bcallaway11 / did

Difference in Differences with Multiple Periods, website: https://bcallaway11.github.io/did
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License? #116

Open nilshg opened 2 years ago

nilshg commented 2 years ago

What's the license under which this package is published?

zthab commented 2 years ago

From the CRAN reference document its GPL-2. Source: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/did/did.pdf (first page)

nilshg commented 2 years ago

Thanks, that's helpful. @bcallaway11 I'm interested in implement this method in Julia, and looking at the code here would be very helpful in doing so. That said, Julia world generally uses MIT licensing and people are quite wary of GPL due to its virality. Would you be okay for me to base an MIT-licensed implementation (of course with proper attribution) on this package?

bcallaway11 commented 2 years ago

@nilshg This slipped out of my mind. I'm definitely ok with you implementing this in Julia.

I don't really know too much about licenses and haven't thought too much about this. If you have general comments/suggestions, I'd be open to them. Tagging @pedrohcgs

pedrohcgs commented 2 years ago

All good on my end!

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 20:24 bcallaway11 @.***> wrote:

@nilshg https://github.com/nilshg This slipped out of my mind. I'm definitely ok with you implementing this in Julia.

I don't really know too much about licenses and haven't thought too much about this. If you have general comments/suggestions, I'd be open to them. Tagging @pedrohcgs https://github.com/pedrohcgs

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nilshg commented 2 years ago

Thanks both, I might be publishing an initial (panel data only) port of drdid in Julia soonish then!

As for your general point @bcallaway11, in the Julia ecosystem the standard license is the MIT license, which is widely seen as the most permissive FOSS license. The main difference to GPL as far as I understand (IANAL etc.) is that GPL is "viral", i.e. any derived work will have to be licensed under GPL as well. This is what motivated my question here: in implementing my Julia port, I looked at the R code for drdid, and simply looking at the code makes my code a derived work. I therefore wouldn't be allowed to publish under a different license from GPL, which would likely restrict take-up in Julia-world as people wouldn't want to take on GPL dependencies.

Here's some discussion about this in the R ecosystem: https://r-pkgs.org/license.html which suggests that R is a bit unusual in favouring the less permissive copyleft licenses (like GPL). I think this is mainly a cultural/path-dependency issue rather than a principled objection to more permissive licensing for the most part, so you might want to think about changing to an MIT license!