Licenses

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Overview

License information on this site comes from the License field of each package's DESCRIPTION file. No license file is opened and no terms are interpreted. The dependency-license page groups these declared strings into families and counts them across the install tree.

The dependency-license card and explorer

All 7 installed dependencies are permissively licensed. No copyleft obligations in the install tree.

License make-up of the 7 packages shown

MIT 2Apache 1Custom (see file) 1Other 1Unspecified 1Creative Commons 1

Explore the dependency graph

Walk what textutils needs, broken down by Depends / Imports / LinkingTo / Suggests, and what those packages need in turn. Suggests are shown one level out (they are not installed transitively).

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An illustrative package with mostly invented dependencies. MASS, Matrix, and lattice are real recommended packages. The dependency-type toggles are interactive and recompute the summary live.

This page is CRAN only and is linked from the Declared dependencies card on each package page.

License family classification

Each declared license string is grouped into one of twelve families based on recognized keywords. No SPDX parsing or file reading is involved. CRAN maintains its own list of recognized license specifications.

The twelve families are: AGPL, LGPL, GPL, MPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, CC0 / public domain, Artistic, Creative Commons, Custom (file reference), and Other. A package with no License field is labeled Unspecified. Together these cover all license strings currently on CRAN.

Compound declarations like GPL-3 | MIT are assigned to a single family. MIT + file LICENSE is classified as MIT without opening the referenced file. Unlimited is classified as MIT.

Four families (AGPL, LGPL, GPL, MPL) are flagged as copyleft. The bar uses four colors: green for permissive, blue for weak copyleft, amber for copyleft, and grey for everything else (unrecognized strings, file-only references, Creative Commons, and undeclared).

AGPL-3: AGPL, amber, copyleft
LGPL (>= 2.1): LGPL, blue, copyleft
GPL (>= 2): GPL, amber, copyleft
MPL-2.0: MPL, blue, copyleft
MIT + file LICENSE: MIT, green, not copyleft
BSD_3_clause + file LICENSE: BSD, green, not copyleft
Apache License (>= 2): Apache, green, not copyleft
CC0: CC0 / public domain, green, not copyleft
Artistic-2.0: Artistic, green, not copyleft
Unlimited: MIT, green, not copyleft
CC BY-SA 4.0: Creative Commons, grey, not copyleft
EUPL-1.2: Other, grey, not copyleft
file LICENSE: Custom (see file), grey, not copyleft
(no License field): Unspecified, grey, not copyleft

Family and copyleft flag produced by the actual classifier. Colors are this site's labels for the tones returned.

Dependency license summary

The dependency-license page provides a summary of the license landscape across a package's install tree. There are three possible outcomes:

No dependencies for the current selection, shown when the tree is empty or all dependency types are toggled off.
All permissive (green) when no dependency in the counted set was classified into one of the four copyleft families. This tests that the copyleft count is zero, not that every dependency was positively identified as permissive.
Some copyleft (amber) when one or more dependencies are classified as GPL, LGPL, AGPL, or MPL, with a note about potential redistribution implications.

Base and recommended packages (MASS, Matrix, lattice, mgcv, nlme, survival) are excluded from the count. Several of these are GPL or LGPL on CRAN but are treated as Base R for the purposes of this summary.

Toggling Suggests on adds suggested dependencies to the count and changes the wording to note that suggested packages are not installed by default. The dependency tree walk follows Depends, Imports, and LinkingTo edges below the first level.

License information elsewhere on the site

License-related information appears in several other places:

The package page hero shows the declared license string and may display SPDX and OSI flags from the code-metrics pipeline.
The version-compare page includes SPDX compliance and OSI-approved flags as boolean fields that can change between releases.
The Repository card shows the license detected by the code hosting platform (e.g. GitHub) for the source repository, which may differ from the declared license.
The statistics page and the search license filter both use the exact declared string rather than the family grouping.

Interpreting license figures

A green summary means no copyleft family was found in the counted set. It does not mean every dependency's license was identified or is permissive. Grey segments represent dependencies whose license family was not determined.

A family badge shows the first match from the classifier, so a compound declaration like GPL-3 | MIT shows only one family. All figures update when the dependency-type toggles change, so any number taken from this page depends on which toggles were active.

The declared license string belongs to the current CRAN version. For removed packages it reflects the last release. Enhances edges are not included in any count. The four bar colors are this site's own grouping for quick reading, not a legal classification.