License cheat sheet

[dgkf]

Similar to https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ , it would be great to have a little brief summary of the implications of licenses - especially when sharing the report to people that are not steeped in the open source discourse.

[llrs-roche]

I can think two approaches:

• a excerpt or
• a screenshot of the summary:

The only challenge is which source do I use and how to get it...

There are also some methods to license is FOSS within R. We could report that too:

ap <- available.packages()
ab <- available.packages(filters = "license/FOSS")
setdiff(rownames(ap), rownames(ab))
##  [1] "acled.api"                "airGRdatasets"            "akima"                    "BerkeleyForestsAnalytics" "cellOrigins"             
##  [6] "creditr"                  "fishstat"                 "hilbertSimilarity"        "IDmining"                 "INCATome"                
## [11] "isa2"                     "openSkies"                "PepSAVIms"                "phenolocrop"              "Radviz"                  
## [16] "Rblpapi"                  "rethnicity"               "RJSplot"                  "RSCAT"                    "RTriangle"               
## [21] "sfdct"                    "TGS"                      "tripack"                  "vmeasur"                  "x13binary"  

Which report packages with: "ACM | file LICENSE", "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0", "CC BY-NC 4.0", "file LICENSE".

[llrs-roche]

I added a table (currently without colors). See the screenshot:

However, this approach misses 0.5% of packages on CRAN.

There is an upcoming task to work on this space from R itself as part of the R dev day (r-devel/r-dev-day#84). I'll wait till that is done to merge (unless someone wants this sooner) because maybe there is a better way to do this that will work for all R packages or that is easier to parse than just manually update a table inside the package.

[llrs-roche]

While my approach is simple, it lacks the good looks of the choose a license website. Adding coloring or (removing rows that don't have any restriction (Same license for example on the picture above) could help readers of the report.