critical-data-book
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MIT-LCP
Correct license
critical-data-book/LICENSE
License is currently MIT license. Need to clarify what license the code will be under, especially since most of the code also appears in some form in the book.
The book is licensed as CC-BY-NC if I remember correctly (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/), but this license isn't really appropriate for code (for various reasons...e.g. the meaning of 'non-commercial' is fuzzy, code gets merged with other code which can make attributions complicated, etc). My preference is to treat the code as a separate object and share it under the MIT license.
I have included my code in various forms which aren't simply code as well (see Rmd files). Need to discuss it.
A few thoughts:
Preference of licence Based on my limited knowledge of licences, I would prefer the MIT licence to be used rather than the GNU GPL.
Potential licence conflicts due to code being both printed in the book and provided as files To my knowledge, in Section 3 there aren't any instances of chunks of code being written in the text. Rather, we will simply refer to code files or functions, and provide brief descriptions of them. Therefore, for Section 3 we don't need to worry about conflicts between difference licences for the book text and code repository.
Use of pre-existing GPL code within our work I have used some pre-existing code protected by the GNU GPL in one of my chapters. If we do use the MIT Licence then any suggestions as to how to handle this would be appreciated!
I also prefer the MIT license where possible. @peterhcharlton, do you know the creator of the GPL-licensed code? If so, one option would be to ask them to release the code in parallel under a more permissive license. See:
- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#HeardOtherLicense
- http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/242760/can-i-as-author-and-copyright-holder-relicense-my-code-under-a-more-liberal-li
Alternatively, is the code available in a different repository? If so, it could be added as a submodule, in a similar way to @jraffa's R package: https://github.com/MIT-LCP/critical-data-book/tree/master/section2/chapter5
Thanks for the links @tompollard , very helpful. In this instance I'm keen to adhere to the original author's wishes that their code be distributed under the GNU GPL. Therefore, I'll modify the scripts for chapter 10 so that the user is prompted to download the GNU GPL file manually, to make sure that they're aware that it's covered by that licence instead.