[R] Regarding {KernSmooth} - Can a package on CRAN have non GPL copyrights?

[Murray Stokely]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm not sure who to ask this, so I'm posting this here.
>
> I just ran:
>  require(KernSmooth)
> And got (I bolded the text):
> Loading required package: KernSmooth
> KernSmooth 2.23 loaded
> *Copyright M. P. Wand 1997-2009*
> Warning message:
> package 'KernSmooth' was built under R version 2.12.1
>
> What does that mean?

There are many licenses used on CRAN, such as BSD, MIT, GPL, LGPL, and
public domain.  There are even some that aren't really open source at
all such as 'akima' and 'SparseM'.  These packages make additional
restrictions such as that a license is only granted for academic /
non-commercial use.  It's particularly annoying that many other
packages without such restrictions depend on these packages, making it
pretty difficult to ensure license compliance for companies using R.

The fact that the code is Copyright by that author is somewhat
orthogonal to the license he chooses to distribute it under.  See the
LICENSE file.  In this case, it's much more open than GPL -- it is
completely unrestricted / public domain.  After reading the license
for the package you are interested in, you may like to read how those
licenses are interpreted by e.g.

   http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

             - Murray