Add richer license discussion about r-pkgs HOT 10 CLOSED

Update to mention how use_mit_license() etc work (i.e. including LICENSE.md that's build-ignored)

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Material cut out of Whole Game that should be reincorporated in the main license section

(For the record, Whole Game does explain the "deal" with LICENSE.md, since it uses MIT and it comes up.)

For future projects, there is more guidance on licenses in these sources:

• The License section of this book
• Writing R Extensions
• GitHub's guide at http://choosealicense.com

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When a project starts with MIT, with a LICENSE file with copyright holder and year, then switches to GPL because it starts including GPL packages, does it need to delete the LICENSE file? Either way, I suggest clarifying that in the book.

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I think R-exts now sort of suggests that one can include a normal LICENSE file (that is, normal with respect to the open source world), and add it to .Rbuildignore. More complicated stuff goes into LICENSE.note.

Whereas you should feel free to include a license file in your source distribution, please do not arrange to install yet another copy of the GNU COPYING or COPYING.LIB files but refer to the copies on https://www.R-project.org/Licenses/ and included in the R distribution (in directory share/licenses). Since files named LICENSE or LICENCE will be installed, do not use these names for standard license files. To include comments about the licensing rather than the body of a license, use a file named something like LICENSE.note.

At least, that's what this paragraph (from R-exts) suggests. We also received a suggestion to do it that way for the websocket package, which is GPL-2 licensed but includes C/C++ libraries with various licenses. https://github.com/rstudio/websocket/blob/5281bd4332c1843a421181263d54b7241aa215b6/cran-comments.md

I think that in general, it's good to have a normal LICENSE file that follows the same standard used by other open source projects.

Update: With License: MIT, and a normal LICENSE file that is in .Rbuildignore, R CMD check gives this:

License components which are templates and need '+ file LICENSE':
  MIT

So perhaps .Rbuildignore-ing the LICENSE file won't work, at least for MIT.

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@wch The current logic of usethis::use_mit_license() satisfies both the open source world and CRAN. We put a copy of the MIT license in LICENSE.md and Rbuildignore it and use LICENSE for the short year + copyright holder(s) template.

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That sounds like the inverse of what I suggested, but if that's the way to pass R CMD check, I guess that's the way to do it.

That reminds me: another thing that could really use clarification is how to handle the inclusion of third-party libraries with their various licenses. We've done it a few different ways in different repos, mostly because over time, CRAN has changed what they've told us to do.

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how to handle the inclusion of third-party libraries with their various licenses

My most recent experience of this is with readxl and I was also instructed to put this in LICENSE.note (readxl is GPL-3, libxls is BSD 2):

https://github.com/tidyverse/readxl/blob/master/LICENSE.note

And then the authors of the embedded libraries are also listed as ctb and cph. This all seems consistent with the websocket notes, yes?

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What you have in readxl does appear to be consistent with what they asked for with websocket.

One thing that's missing from both packages is actual license text for the package itself; CRAN doesn't think it's important, but I think we should try to figure out some way to include it.

Just to add a bit of historical context: with Shiny, it took some back and forth before CRAN was satisfied, and the end result is the DESCRIPTION has License: GPL-3 | file LICENSE, and the text of the licenses for the included libraries are in LICENSE.

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@hadley Is this issue on your radar? I believe it's our oldest!

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Yes, this is mostly handled in the new license chapter, so I think we can close.

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