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daattali / shinyjs

💡 Easily improve the user experience of your Shiny apps in seconds
https://deanattali.com/shinyjs
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Clarify license in README and website #240

Closed ghost closed 3 years ago

ghost commented 3 years ago

Thanks for a great package!

Looking at CRAN, it appears that this package is MIT licensed. However, this was not clear to me from either the website or the GitHub README.

It would be great if this were easier to find. 😄

daattali commented 3 years ago

It used to be a commercial license but I changed it to MIT. Is there anywhere in the README or on the website or anywhere else that still says "commercial" or gives any indication it's not free to use?

ghost commented 3 years ago

I was confused because there is nowhere on the website or README that mentions the MIT license. Also, the license file just has your name and the copyright year. (I understand that's the format required by CRAN).

The way that copyright works, unless something is explicitly licensed, it's not free to use. I can use it because I found the MIT license on CRAN. But if I hadn't thought to check CRAN, I would not have felt able to use it.

daattali commented 3 years ago

This is the standard convention for R packages: the license is provided in the DESCRIPTION file. Every R package follows this format. I try to keep the README concise so I'd rather not put raised non essential information in it.

ghost commented 3 years ago

Thanks. I'm not particular familiar with R packaging conventions.

Would you consider at least adding the line: License: MIT + file LICENSE to the README or the website? This would help people like myself who don't know to look in the DESCRIPTION file. (Or even License: See DESCRIPTION)

Or you could add the following badge which uses shields.io to automatically fetch the license from CRAN:

![CRAN/METACRAN](https://img.shields.io/cran/l/shinyjs)

CRAN/METACRAN

daattali commented 3 years ago

I really prefer not to add more information or badges to the readme. Most R packages are MIT, and don't explicitly say so because it's required to write it in the DESCRIPTION.

I do think the LICENSE file should say "MIT" in it, and I actually advocated for that in the past, because that would make the license file a standalone. But unfortunately CRAN does not want to support that, so this is where we are

ghost commented 3 years ago

I'll close this issue then. Thanks again for a great package. :)