#Rstudio license how to#
We’ll start by talking about code that you write, and how to license it to make clear how you want people to treat it. (If you run the code in this chapter, please make sure that you’re using usethis 2.0.0 or greater writing this chapter prompted a number of changes in the package.) 12.2 Code you write Note that simply using a package or R itself doesn’t require that you comply with the license this is why you can write proprietary R code and why R packages can have any license you choose.įor more details about licensing R packages, I recommend Licensing R by Colin Fay. This chapter will start with licensing your own code, and then cover the most important details of receiving code from other people (e.g. in a PR) and bundling other people’s code into your package. The R community is a little different: as of 2020, my analysis (following Sean Kross’s blog post) found that ~70% of CRAN packages use a copyleft license and ~15% use a permissive license.
For example, a 2015 survey of GitHub repositories found that ~55% used a permissive license and ~20% used a copyleft license. When you look across all programming languages, permissive licenses are the most common. To get a high-level view of the open source licensing space, and the details of individual licenses, I highly recommend, which I’ve used in the links above. The most common copyleft license is the GPL which allows you to freely copy and modify the code for personal use, but if you publish modified versions or bundle with other code, the modified version or complete bundle must also be licensed with the GPL. The MIT and Apache licenses are the most common modern permissive licenses older permissive licenses include the various forms of the BSD license.Ĭopyleft licenses are stricter. Code with a permissive license can be freely copied, modified, and published, and the only restriction is that the license must be preserved. To understand the author’s wishes, it’s useful to understand the two major camps of open source licenses: Fortunately, you don’t need to be an expert to do the right thing: respecting how an author wants their code to be treated as indicated by the license they’ve picked.
#Rstudio license software#
Software licensing is a large and complicated field, made particularly complex because it lies at the intersection of programming and law. The goal of this chapter is to give you the basic tools to manage licensing for your R package.
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