Make a recommendation on which license to use to publish tilt packages

[Tilmon]

Hi @maurolepore ,

Can you come up with a recommendation on which license type (or summary of, in your eyes, most relevant licenses) we should use to publish code? This will then serve as a basis for the decision-making.

Background:
Once the end-to-end workflow is ready, we want to publish all the relevant software packages and share it within an interested network (user group banks, etc.). For that, we need to decide which license type we use. @AnneSchoenauer and I were hoping that you can help us with the decision.

I saw that right now e.g. tiltIndicator, tiltIndicatorAfter, tiltToyData are published under the MIT license. As far as I understand, the MIT license allows others to modify our work and distribute it under another license, e.g. in a proprietary way. What is your take on using a more restrictive license that restricts users to publish modifications under the same license or at least also publish the source code under any license? It could make sense for us to be a bit more restrictive in the beginning, to mitigate the risk of others using our work in a commercial way.

There are many websites with summaries on licenses, such as this one here, but would be good to hear your thoughts and ideally get a recommendation from you based on your experience in the open-source world.

Thanks!

[maurolepore]

I use advise from here:

• If you want a permissive license so people can use your code with minimal restrictions, choose the MIT license.
• If you want a copyleft license so that all derivatives and bundles of your code are also open source, choose the GPLv3 license.
• If your package primarily contains data, not code, and you want minimal restrictions, choose the CC0 license... Or if you want to require attribution when your data is used, choose the CC BY license.
• If you don’t want to make your code open source use ["Copyright YEAR OWNER. All rights reserved."]. Such packages can not be distributed by CRAN.

---

We went through this conversation with the r2dii packages. We started with GLP but we then changed to MIT. See them here:

• https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/r2dii.match/index.html
• https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/r2dii.analysis/index.html
• https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/r2dii.plot/index.html

[Tilmon]

Thanks @maurolepore, that helps a lot! Why did you move from GPL to MIT with PACTA?

[maurolepore]

To give users total freedom. The product owners of PACTA didn't mind users potentially selling a product powered by our open source software.

We got some inspiration from here: https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2021/12/relicensing-packages/

Our packages are an unconditional gift that can be freely used without reciprocal obligation

[Tilmon]

Thanks!
Note to myself for future reference that under the link that you, @maurolepore , shared, there is a link to the author's (Mara Averick) notes on re-licensing and things to consider when making decisions around licenses which are super useful for us I think: "Notes on re-licensing"
cc' @AnneSchoenauer

[maurolepore]

Great find @Tilmon

Thanks @batpigandme

[AnneSchoenauer]

@Tilmon did you write a ticket on changing liceneses based on our decision?

[Tilmon]

yep, @AnneSchoenauer please see here Change package licenses to GPLv3
#670