Change license

[dewittpe]

After discussions I had about potential issues with adoption and use of R packages with GPL-2 licenses due to copyleft concerns, I want to change the license for medicalcoder.

The initial license of GPL-2 was made for no other reason that than was the default in the DESCRIPTION file template I used when setting up the code base.

After a very useful discussion with @magic-lantern I propose transitioning from GPL-2 to BSD-3-Clause. This is a very permissive license and there are zero copyleft concerns.

To make this license change requires explicit approval from all contributors to the package:

• @dewittpe
• @tdbennett
• @magic-lantern (via email)
• @rebullm (via email)
• @vincerubinetti

For your reference here is the CRAN BSD-3-Clause license note.

Please respond to this PR with a comment indicating your approval or disapproval of the change in license.

Thanks!

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 96.52%. Comparing base (f6aa816) to head (1245edc).
⚠️ Report is 5 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main      #39   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   96.52%   96.52%           
=======================================
  Files          17       17           
  Lines        1295     1295           
=======================================
  Hits         1250     1250           
  Misses         45       45           

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[magic-lantern]

Sent email, but also documenting here - I approve of the license change from GPL2 to BSD-3-Clause. I've reviewed the associated code changes as well.

Perhaps I'm just missing it, but I believe it is recommended practice to include a LICENSE file with the text of the license. It seems the current file just has year, copyright holders (authors), and organization.

[dewittpe]

Perhaps I'm just missing it, but I believe it is recommended practice to include a LICENSE file with the text of the license. It seems the current file just has year, copyright holders (authors), and organization.

CRAN has the bsd_3_clause file and the instructions from CRAN are to have a LICENSE file with just the three lines - see the instructions from r-project: https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/BSD_3_clause

Also, see the Licensing section of the Writing R Extensions manual.

If you add the text of the BSD-3-Clause to the LICENSE file, build the package and run R CMD check, you'll get a NOTE

* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... NOTE                                                                                                                                                            
License stub is invalid DCF. 

[vincerubinetti]

I approve the change of license from GPL2 to BSD-3.

Sorry for the delay!