Re: relicense SPSS reading code?

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Jack Tanner writes:

> Ben, John,
> Thank you for taking my question seriously and positively. It seems like 
> there may be a way forward, although I imagine that relicensing R to GPL 
> v3 is not feasible.

> I am only a user of R, not a developer. What happened was that 1) I 
> contacted the core R developers asking if read.spss() could be updated, 
> 2) Brian Ripley pointed out the licensing issue, 3) I asked whether 
> inquiring with you, PSPP developers, would be of interest, and 4) Kurt 
> Hornik, one of the R developers, encouraged me to reach out to you.

> The R-core mailing list is off limits to non-members, so I don't know if 
> there has been any follow-up discussion there. There's little I can do 
> to contribute to this effort aside from starting the conversation. I'm 
> CC'ing Kurt Hornik in the hopes that he can facilitate further.

> Kurt, an oustanding question right now is: which PSPP files does R 
> require? "Obviously sys-file-reader.c, sys-file-reader.h, 
> sys-file-private.h, but those have dependencies.  Do you have a complete 
> list?"

Sorry for not writing back any sooner.

It seems that there is no easy answer, given that apparently the PSPP
code base has changed substantially relative to what is used in the R
foreign package, and no currently active core developer is familiar
enough with the code base to be able to quickly assess this.

So I guess this will need revisiting at a later time ...

Best
-k


> Cheers.

> On 8/3/2013 1:42 AM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 03, 2013 at 07:35:56AM +0200, John Darrington wrote:
>>> I would not be tototally against it.  But I think a better solution would be
>>> to change the licence of R to GPL3+
>> 
>> I agree that that would be preferable.  I do not know R well, so I do
>> not know whether there is some barrier.
>> 
>>> At the end of the day, the copyright belongs to the FSF, so the
>>> decision would lie with them.
>> 
>> It seems to be customary, at least, within the FSF, to allow the authors
>> of FSF copyrighted code to relicense it to free software licenses.  For
>> example, this is often done for gnulib modules.
>> 
>> I think that your other questions are apt.  I hope to learn the answers.
>> 
>>