Thanks. Our package has LGPL (>= 2) licence, so we'll copy with header
and proper acknowledgements.
Gordon
On Mon, 9 Jul 2012, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jul 2012, Gordon K Smyth wrote:
Dear all,
I'm writing to ask for advice as to best practice. A PhD student working
with me is writing C++ code that we hope to make public as src code in our
Bioconductor package edgeR. He wants to call the function fmm_spline,
which is part of the source code for the stats package
http://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/stats/src/splines.c,
from his C++ code. This function isn't one of the entry points for C code
documented in Chapter 6 of the "Writing R extensions" manual.
None of those are in a package.
We haven't figured out a way to call the fmm_spline function directly from
our C++ code. Is there a way that we have missed?
Not a very portable way, but there are some ideas in 'Writing R Extensions'.
I don't think they are enough for a CRAN or BioC package, though.
Can we simply copy the fmm_spline function into our C++ code and declare
where we got it from? Should we include the license declaration from the
header of splines.c? Anything else we need to do satisfying copyright and
be good citizens?
If your package has a compatible licence, you can (and you must include the
whole header when you copy). CRAN's policies say that when you copy code
from elsewhere you must include that code's authors in the Authors field of
your package, and that clearly is good practice.
Thanks a lot
Gordon
---------------------------------------------
Professor Gordon K Smyth,
Bioinformatics Division,
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research,
1G Royal Parade, Parkville, Vic 3052, Australia.
Tel: (03) 9345 2326, Fax (03) 9347 0852,
http://www.statsci.org/smyth
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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