Closed fabianegli closed 3 years ago
https://opensource.guide/legal/, https://www.fsf.org/licensing/ and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html are valuable resources, not only to developers choosing a license but also as a resource of convincing arguments that can be sway the opinion of legal teams involved that have to greenlight the use of a permissive license.
The License of PTXQC is BSD-3 clause and thus very permissive.
See https://github.com/cbielow/PTXQC/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L43
which says
License: BSD_3_clause + file LICENSE
You are probably referring to the LICENSE file, which is admittedly confusing by itself, but unfortunately (once again) another CRAN weirdness. Other packages (e.g. https://github.com/hadley/plyr which use MIT also have to follow this questionable scheme). Sorry, but nothing I can do about it, unless someone is willing to file a petition with CRAN :)
I've added a small paragraph to the readme.md
to make the license very explicit. Hope that helps.
Thank you for the update and continuing to educate me on R-package development quirks. I do not intend to change R at all.
Maybe GitHub could/should display the licensing information in R-package repositories better by default.
Another option for you could be to add a licensing badge at the top of the README. That would look like so:
Since the note made it into the README I think this issue is sufficiently served to be closed.
Good point. I've added the badge as well. Closing issue.
While the README and the PTXQC developers/maintainer encourage community contributions, the license does not. I strongly suggest to change to a more permissive license.
Some immediate thoughts:
The applicability of the current license to code originating from pull requests of contributors from outside the "PTXQC Team" is questionable at best.
I like PTXQC but would like it even more if it were released under a GPLv3, MIT or similar license.