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Licensing

Package licensing and enterprise use

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For enterprise users of R, licensing terms of open source software can occupy a significant share of Legal and Corporate Architecture departments time. In Should R Consortium Recommend CII Best Practices Badge for R Packages: Latest Survey Results, one survey topic touched on the licensing of R packages. In talking with various enterprise users of R, there were a few suggestions about how the R community could make leveraging R packages easier within enterprises, while allowing Legal and Corporate Architecture departments to get more sleep.

Getting approvals to use packages

Some of you may be familiar with the process that enterprise users of R packages go through for approvals to use R in their products. Third party software often needs to go through legal reviews, corporate architectural reviews, security reviews, and line of business approvals before they can find their way into use within an enterprise or in products that they produce.

One area of concern is the use of GPL licenses, and the potential impact they may have on proprietary software. See Why GPL still gives enterprises the jitters for more discussion. While there are varying debates about the true impact of a certain license designation, for example, GPL–2 versus GPL–3, in many large organizations, a more conservative interpretation is often applied. (Comparing license options.)

Perhaps less known, is that it’s not just the license of the package in question, but all of its dependent packages, recursively. For example, is a GPL–3 licensed package using a GPL–2 license package validly designated?

What can we do?

When we ask representatives of enterprises who are responsible for approving the use of third-party software what would make their easier, a few suggestions for package authors and maintainers arise concerning licensing:

  • Packages should not depend on other packages that have incompatibly licensed materials
  • Use the most permissive license possible for your package, for example, LGPL, GPL–3 or GPL>=2, as opposed to just GPL–2
  • Minimize the number of dependent packages whenever possible, since each one requires its own approval process which affects adoption
  • Avoid using packages with more restrictive licensing terms than you intend for your package

We encourage package authors and maintainers to review their dependent packages and look for opportunities to address the suggestions above. Where possible, encourage dependent package authors and maintainers to adopt more permissive licenses as well. Where not possible, ask whether the functionality provided by the dependent package is essential.

For enterprise users of open source software, ask your Legal departments to share their concerns with developers so more informed choices can be made in the future.