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

[Wush Wu]

Dear Dirk,

About hiredis, I am trying to improve the efficiency of rredis with Bryan,
the maintainer of rredis now. Even though we might not need hiredis, the
copyright issue will still bother me in the future.

Note that your example is interesting, because it shows that the
performance of rredis is irrelevant to object size:

> object.size(X)90032 bytes> object.size(1L)48 bytes> microbenchmark(unit="us",+ 							 redisSet("a", X),+ 							 redisSet("a", 1L)+ )Unit: microseconds
              expr      min        lq    median       uq      max neval
  redisSet("a", X) 1073.182  2840.758  3152.705 39996.36 83851.59   100
 redisSet("a", 1L)  939.156 39572.178 39916.634 40098.82 68149.80
100> > microbenchmark(unit="us",+ 							 serialize(X, NULL),+ 							
serialize(1L, NULL)+ 							 )Unit: microseconds
                expr     min      lq   median       uq      max neval
  serialize(X, NULL) 173.906 183.578 190.7025 197.3725 8127.923   100
 serialize(1L, NULL)   7.474   9.464  10.3725  10.9660   84.020   100



Thanks for this test case. I will discuss it with Bryan.


>  | 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.
>
> It is inconsistent, but possibly changing. There are old ones that don't
> have
> it, newer ones tend to.
>
> | - Sources are provided by the OS, the user should manually download the
> source
>
> Or use his package manager of choice.  No COPYRIGHT or AUTHOR issue.
>
> | - Sources are embedded in the package but unchanged. The R package links
> to the
> | 3rd party library.
>
> CRAN would say sources in the papckage, with COPYRIGHT and AUTHOR
> implications.
>
> | - Sources are modified.
> | - Reproduce the source file into a single file and put it in the `src`
> | directory.
>
> Ditto.
>
> | I am not sure if here is a right place to discuss this issue. Please let
> me
> | know if it is inappropriate.
>
> As Romain said, it is a generic packaging issue which you should discuss
> on r-devel.
>
>
Thank you, Romain and Dirk.

Sorry that I wrongly asked the question here.
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