Bug#884115: Ioslides inside rmarkdown has no license

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Yihui,

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 02:32:50PM -0600, Yihui Xie wrote:
> 
> I took over the maintenance of the rmarkdown package only recently, and I
> was not the person who introduced ioslides to the rmarkdown package. That
> said, it does seem that the ioslides library's license is missing and
> unclear. I'm not its author, so I cannot add a license to it. I guess it
> will be difficult to get in touch with its original authors.

I'm in touch with a fork author which I assumed the author and hope for
clarification[1]
 
> I don't quite see the benefits of making a Debian package for rmarkdown. It
> is an R package, and it is fairly easy to install from CRAN. Those who use
> R should be able to install it without sudo apt-get, and those who do not
> use R probably won't care about an R package.

I have heard this argument very frequently but it is simply wrong.  We
have some packages in Debian which internally are using R packages.  If
we do not provide this package we need to restrict the functionality of
those packages which is clearly not in our interest.

> On the other hand, I guess a
> Debian version of rmarkdown that does not have ioslides can be confusing.

I wonder whether it is conform with CRAN guidelines to have parts of
code which has no license.  According to Debian rules this is non-free
and can not be distributet.  I would be astonished if CRAN rules would
be more relaxed in this aspect.

Kind regards and thanks for your quick reply

   Andreas.

[1] https://github.com/pauldijou/ioslides/issues/1

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Bug#884115: Ioslides inside rmarkdown has no license

[Yihui Xie]

Hi Andreas,

I took over the maintenance of the rmarkdown package only recently, and I
was not the person who introduced ioslides to the rmarkdown package. That
said, it does seem that the ioslides library's license is missing and
unclear. I'm not its author, so I cannot add a license to it. I guess it
will be difficult to get in touch with its original authors.

I don't quite see the benefits of making a Debian package for rmarkdown. It
is an R package, and it is fairly easy to install from CRAN. Those who use
R should be able to install it without sudo apt-get, and those who do not
use R probably won't care about an R package. On the other hand, I guess a
Debian version of rmarkdown that does not have ioslides can be confusing.

Regards,
Yihui
--
https://yihui.name

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 1:11 AM, Andreas Tille  wrote:

> Hi Yihui Xie,
>
> I'm considering packaging rmarkdown for Debian since several just
> packaged software would profit from it.  For Debian uploads I need to
> make sure that each file of the source is available and has a proper
> license.  When I inspected the code I stumbled upon ioslides.  This
> project has no license in itself (neither in the code copy inside
> rmarkdown) nor upstream[1].  Besides the missing license I also notice
> that it contains third party components consisting of compressed
> JavaScript which is considered by Debian as "binary code" since you can
> not really change it.
>
> Do you see some means to provide a proper license for all components
> of ioslides and specifically the source code of
>
>inst/rmd/ioslides/ioslides-13.5.1/js/polyfills/dataset.min.js
>inst/rmd/ioslides/ioslides-13.5.1/js/polyfills/history.min.js
>
> where I failed to find the origin?
>
> If not I might consider striping ioslides from the Debian package at
> all by disabling the ioslides_presentation function.  As far as I
> can see rmarkdown is quite featureful even without this.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Kind regards
>
>Andreas.
>
> [1] I checked
> https://code.google.com/p/io-2012-slides/  as well as
> https://github.com/pauldijou/ioslides
>
> --
> http://fam-tille.de
>

Bug#884115: Ioslides inside rmarkdown has no license

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Yihui Xie,

I'm considering packaging rmarkdown for Debian since several just
packaged software would profit from it.  For Debian uploads I need to
make sure that each file of the source is available and has a proper
license.  When I inspected the code I stumbled upon ioslides.  This
project has no license in itself (neither in the code copy inside
rmarkdown) nor upstream[1].  Besides the missing license I also notice
that it contains third party components consisting of compressed
JavaScript which is considered by Debian as "binary code" since you can
not really change it.

Do you see some means to provide a proper license for all components
of ioslides and specifically the source code of

   inst/rmd/ioslides/ioslides-13.5.1/js/polyfills/dataset.min.js
   inst/rmd/ioslides/ioslides-13.5.1/js/polyfills/history.min.js

where I failed to find the origin?

If not I might consider striping ioslides from the Debian package at
all by disabling the ioslides_presentation function.  As far as I
can see rmarkdown is quite featureful even without this.

What do you think?

Kind regards

   Andreas.

[1] I checked
https://code.google.com/p/io-2012-slides/  as well as
https://github.com/pauldijou/ioslides

-- 
http://fam-tille.de