Open Source Licenses

Licenses

EUPL

EUPL license is simple and meaningful and has been created for the EC public institutions

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc5b9a.pdf?id=32429

• internal rules about OSS development and collaboration
• clarifying the position of developed software
• there is not a set of guidelines that can be followed
• even if there is a work in progress about that
• intention to constitute a OSS expert group

BSD 3

You can do whatever you want with BSD-licensed code as long as you give the original author credit. Specifically:

• don’t remove their name from the code and don’t claim that you wrote it
• let others know you’re using code you didn’t write
• don’t use the author’s name in advertising your product

Other than that, do whatever you like as long as you don’t sue them. You don’t have to:

• Provide their code
• License your code as open source
• Provide your changes to their code

Source: stackoverflow

CC0

The Creative Commons licenses are usually used for artistic and creative works, however the CC0 license is also appropriate for software. The CC0 license dedicates your R package to the public domain, which means that you give up all copyright claims to your R package. The CC0 license allows your software to join other great works like Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Scarlet Letter in the public domain.

GPL

Known as the GPL, the GNU GPL, and GPL-3, the General Public License was originally written by Richard Stallman. The GPL is known as a copyleft license, meaning that any software that is bundled with or originates from software licensed under the GPL must also be released under the GPL. The exacting meaning of “bundle” will depend a bit on the circumstances. For example, software distributed with an operating system can be licensed under different licenses even if the operating system itself is licensed under the GPL. R is licensed under GPL-2.

MIT

The MIT license is a more permissive license compared to the GPL. MIT licensed software can be modified or incorporated into software that is not open source. The MIT license protects the copyright holder from legal liability that might be incurred from using the software. When using the MIT license in a R package you should specify License: MIT + file LICENSE in the DESCRIPTION file. You should then add a file called LICENSE to your package which uses the following template exactly:

YEAR: [The current year]
COPYRIGHT HOLDER: [Your name or your organization's name]