Properly License R Package that Includes Other MIT Code

Question

Hoping for some wisdom and guidance about licensing an R package I created.

My package, knitrProgressBar, rips out the dplyr::progress_estimated internal function into essentially it's own package (to avoid some dependencies and do some custom things with it), and then adds some code for decision logic.

I would like to properly license my package (using the MIT license), and give proper attribution so that others don't have issues using it (and it can be released via CRAN).

dplyr is licensed under MIT, with RStudio as the copyright holder, and various individuals listed as authors under Authors at R.

I understand I would list myself as the "creator" in the Authors at R field for knitrProgressBar, but I'm not sure who should be listed as authors and copyright holders, and how this information needs to be incorporated into the LICENSE file.

Guidance would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

I finally got an answer somewhere else, and am posting it here so that others can benefit.

The way to do this is:

• for any code taken from another package, include the original license text (in this case the MIT license text from the dplyr GitHub repo) in the file
• Comment on modifications made to that code in the file itself
• Include the authors of the dplyr package as contributors (ctb in Authors@R), with a comment that they are authors on the dplyr code
• Include RStudio as a copyright holder (cph), with a comment that they are the copyright holders of the dplry code
• Include myself as the author / creator of my package

So this should look like:

Authors@R: c(
person("Robert", "Flight", email = "email", role = c("aut", "cre")),
person("Hadley", "Wickham", role = c("ctb"), comment = "Author of included dplyr fragments"),
person("Romain", "Francois", role = "ctb", comment = "Author of included dplyr fragments"),
person("Lionel", "Henry", role = "ctb", comment = "Author of included dplyr fragments"),
person("Kirill", "Müller", role = "ctb", comment = "Author of included dplyr fragments"),
person("RStudio", role = "cph", comment = "Copyright holder of included dplyr fragments")
)

And then have the noted license text in the file with the code from dplyr.