Re: R packages licensed MIT but not shipping a copy of the MIT license itself, Re: R packages licensed MIT but not shipping a copy of the MIT license itself

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Mattia Rizzolo <mattia@debian.org> writes:

> So, today I discovered [0] that R-project has some polices regarding
> licenses [1].  In particular they have one regarding the MIT license
> [2].  This needs to go together with their extensions manuals [3].
>
> Read together they say that if you have an R module you want to license
> under MIT (which is really Expat) you have to:

I think the wording is ambiguous.

At the <URL:https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/> there are no
requirements, and no license grants at all, for the dozen license names
listed. It simply states that those licenses are “in use” for the code
base.

Then some statements that R and some specific parts are “licensed
under”, or “distributed under”, specific named license conditions. Those
could be taken as grant of license as specified in those texts (the GPL
v2, the GPL v3, the LGPL v2.1), since they all give explicit freedom to
do all the actions needed for DFSG freedom.

So the issue you raise would turn on what restrictions are implied by
the earlier listed license pages.

For the “MIT License” page, we have:

> Based on http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
>
> This is a template. Complete and ship as file LICENSE the following 2
> lines (only)
>
> YEAR:
> COPYRIGHT HOLDER: 
>
> and specify as
>
> License: MIT + file LICENSE
>
> Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

I don't think any of the above text implies a *requirement* on the
recipient of the license.

Indeed, the license grant begins at the standard “MIT” (which is
Expat-equivalent) permission grant:
>

> a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
> "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
> without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
> distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
> permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
> the following conditions:
>
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
> included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

That alone grants all the DFSG-conformant freedoms. I don't think
anything else in the text is rightly interpreted to restrict those
freedoms in any way.

It would be better if the guidelines were more clearly phrased to be
guidance for *how* to apply the license; as it is, they are terse and
too easily misread. But I think a careful reading would not imply any
extra restriction on the license recipient.

So in my opinion, this is just a clumsy way to present a page that
nevertheless is an explicit grant of the standard Expat license
conditions in a work.

In short: this does not IMO disqualify the work from conforming to the
DFSG.

Thank you for taking software freedom seriously for Debian recipients.

-- 
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Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au>