Re: copyright issues on debian
On 12 October 2015 at 17:29, Drew Parsons wrote:
[...]
| argument, the question is whether GPL licenced software is allowed to
| link against GPL-licenced software.
Well put.
| When you read it that way, it might make it easier to understand why
| people aren't so worried about the violation. The violation is in the
| technicalities of the GPL versions. That does matter in a legal sense.
| But for the non-legal majority it's a bit of a "whatEver". The
| difference in attitud.
There are packages by very senior R developers with _exactly_ the same
situation as r-cran-afex (and I will now refer to it under its CRAN name
'afex'): licensed as GPL3 only. The majority of GPL-using packages, though,
use GPL (>=2). And that is the spirit Drew so clearly refers.
I would just recommend that you get on with real work, or maybe take it up
with the CRAN maintainers. Here at Debian you are splitting hairs, and most
of us just ignore endeavours such as this. We have real work to do.
Now, I happen to be a board member of the R Foundation, and we care about the
copyright of R itself. CRAN, however, is a bit specialised in that it really
is a project by the 'team of CRAN maintainers' and is _not_ a formal part of
the R Project (mostly for historical reasons). So as such nobody but CRAN
speaks for CRAN and if you want to take the issue to them please feel free to
do so. Just do not expect a guaranteed response from them either -- and Drew
layed out well why not.
Dirk
--
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org
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