license

[jennybc]

Why is this GPL-3?

[richfitz]

Because readxl is was and I used bits of code/looked through the sources enough that I felt it had to be licenced that way.

[jennybc]

Is there any chance that readxl is GPL-3 because of the embedded libraries and the bits of readxl you used have nothing to do with that? And therefore we can license differently? Or are these bits something we could re-write w/o consulting readxl, now that we're better oriented?

[richfitz]

I still think that the GPL bit is necessary though (though it's been a long time since I read through the licences itself). The GPL affects all the code in readxl (not just the libraries) and so on to the code that I wrote first that may not even be there anymore. But I don't pretend to understand almost anything about software licences...

[jennybc]

Tell me what to rewrite and we're safe because god knows I haven't read the internals of readxl 😉.

[oneillkza]

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure for code to be a derivative work, it actually has to copy parts of the code it's deriving from exactly. All of the actual working code for readxl is in C++, while the working code for rexcel is entirely in R, so this is clearly not the case. Although it doesn't hurt to acknowledge readxl, I don't believe there's any reason to feel tied to its license.