[Rcpp-devel] Copyright Issue of using 3rd party C/C++ library in R package

[Wush Wu]

Hello,

I am working on the R wrapper of hiredis, which is a C library released
under BSD license. Since the development package of libhiredis is not
available on many OS such as Mac OS X,Solaris and Windows, I need to embed
the source code of hiredis in the package to make it work.

I submitted my first package to CRAN which contains the source code of
libstrophe(GPL v3). A problem of authorship occurred even if I emphasis the
source is from libstrophe and put the copyright of the libstrophe under the
field COPYRIGHT in the DESCRIPTION file. Finally, the problem is resolved
by putting the author of libstrophe into the author list of the R package.
Is it a suggested way to do so?

I looked into many DESCRIPTION files of CRAN package which contains 3rd
party C library, but I still cannot understand whether I should merge the
author of the library into the AUTHOR field or I only need to put the
reference of 3rd party library in the COPYRIGHT field.

More concretely, which of the following action of the embedded source of
3rd party library occurrs the copyright issue and what is the suggested way
to handle this issue?

- Sources are provided by the OS, the user should manually download the
source
- Sources are embedded in the package but unchanged. The R package links to
the 3rd party library.
- Sources are modified.
- Reproduce the source file into a single file and put it in the `src`
directory.

I am not sure if here is a right place to discuss this issue. Please let me
know if it is inappropriate.

Thanks.

Wush
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/rcpp-devel/attachments/20130908/b59c5918/attachment.html>