On Mon, Sep 8, 2025 at 2:08 PM Duncan Murdoch <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2025-09-08 10:55 a.m., Ilmari Tamminen wrote: > > I would like to release my R code under GPL-3. The code depends on a > package (lme4) that itself uses "GPL >= 2", but which has upstream > dependencies (minqa, numDeriv, rbibutils) that are GPL-2 only. According > to what I've read (see below), GPL-2 and GPL-3 are incompatible. Are the > GPL-2 upstream licenses a problem for my GPL-3 R code? If so, are there > recommended ways of resolving this? > > My understanding is that the licenses of other packages are only > relevant if you are incorporating their code into yours and would like > to release the combined work. > > If your code uses some other package but you are not distributing the > other package then their license doesn't affect your package. > > For example, many packages (including R itself) are written to use > Windows functions, but since they don't distribute copies of those > functions the fact that Windows isn't open source doesn't matter. > This is my belief too, and I've written a bit about it at https://r-pkgs.org/license.html#code-you-use Hadley -- http://hadley.nz [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
