License info

[felixrabe]

Hi - thanks for this project! I'm switching from Sweave at the moment.

Please include more visible licensing information, such as the GPL license text in a LICENSE.txt file and a mention of the license in the README.md. I doubt that burying License: GPL in DESCRIPTION is legally sufficient, but at the least it's hard to determine the license of the project for new users.

[rmflight]

But for R packages, where the primary interaction with the package is expected to be from within R itself, license notification has been in the DESCRIPTION file. AFAIK, there has never been a req. from R packages to include a LICENSE.txt file in the package structure itself.

Just saying, this is where the license information is found for an R package.

[yihui]

This is not the first time I have heard about this issue. I agree it is a problem that an R package has its own convention to declare licenses. I guess it does not hurt to add a statement in readme, so I will do it. Thanks!

[rekado]

What version of the GPL are you referring to? GPLv3+ or GPLv2+? The "markdown" library this package depends on is released under "GPLv2 only".

(I'm asking because this module has been packaged for GNU Guix and I'd like to make sure that the intended license is declared.)

[yihui]

@rekado Again, this is R's convention: https://cran.rstudio.com/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Licensing

Abbreviations GPL and LGPL are ambiguous and usually taken to mean any version of the license

https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/knitr/

[rekado]

Okay. I wanted to make sure that the license is in fact meant to be any version of the license, as it is an ambiguous statement. Thank you for confirming.

[github-actions]

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