usethis: licenses – R documentation

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usethis

licenses

License a package

Description

Adds the necessary infrastructure to declare your package as licensed with one of these popular open source licenses:

Permissive:

MIT: simple and permissive.
Apache 2.0: MIT + provides patent protection.

Copyleft:

GPL v2: requires sharing of improvements.
GPL v3: requires sharing of improvements.
AGPL v3: requires sharing of improvements.
LGPL v2.1: requires sharing of improvements.
LGPL v3: requires sharing of improvements.

Creative commons licenses appropriate for data packages:

CC0: dedicated to public domain.
CC-BY: Free to share and adapt, must give appropriate credit.

See https://choosealicense.com for more details and other options.

Alternatively, for code that you don't want to share with others, use_proprietary_license() makes it clear that all rights are reserved, and the code is not open source.

Usage

use_mit_license(copyright_holder = NULL)

use_gpl_license(version = 3, include_future = TRUE)

use_agpl_license(version = 3, include_future = TRUE)

use_lgpl_license(version = 3, include_future = TRUE)

use_apache_license(version = 2, include_future = TRUE)

use_cc0_license()

use_ccby_license()

use_proprietary_license(copyright_holder)

Arguments

`copyright_holder`	Name of the copyright holder or holders. This defaults to "package name authors"; you should only change this if you use a CLA to assign copyright to a single entity.
`version`	License version. This defaults to latest version all licenses.
`include_future`	If `TRUE`, will license your package under the current and any potential future versions of the license. This is generally considered to be good practice because it means your package will automatically include "bug" fixes in licenses.

Details

CRAN does not permit you to include copies of standard licenses in your package, so these functions save the license as LICENSE.md and add it to .Rbuildignore.