Licensing
Learning objectives:
- Understand why licenses are necessary.
- Learn how to choose an appropriate licence.
- Know the standard ways to add a licence to a project.
Relevant reproducibility guidelines:
- STARS Reproducibility Recommendations (⭐): Share code with an open licence.
What is a licence?
A licence is simply a text file that explains how other people are allowed to use your work.
It usually sets out things like:
- Whether attribution (i.e., citing the original author) is required.
- Whether it can be used for commercial purposes.
- Whether modifications or derivates works are allowed.
- Any rules for sharing (e.g., requiring others to use the same licence or not).
For example, here’s the popular MIT licence:
MIT License
Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.What happens if I don’t include a licence?
If you don’t include a licence, nobody else has permission to use your work.
This means that, legally, people cannot copy, share or modify your code.
This applies to everyone outside of you - even colleagues inside your own organisation.
How do I choose a licence?
Different kinds of licenses exist depending on what you’re sharing. Some are written for software and code, others for text and data.
Licenses can be more permissive (letting people do almost anything, with few requirements) or more restrictive (placing conditions on use or sharing).
Some common examples include:
- MIT Licence - a very permissive, simple licence for software.
- CC BY - a Creative Commons licence requiring attribution for text/content.
- Open Government Licence - a licence often used by the UK public sector.
For helping choosing an appropriate licence:
- For code, visit https://choosealicense.com/.
- For text/data, visit https://creativecommons.org/chooser/.
How do I add a licence to my project?
The easiest way to add a license is during GitHub repository set-up. Just use the Add license option, and Github will add the right LICENSE file for you.
If you didn’t add it then though, it’s still very simply to add a license at any time. You just need to copy the license text from sites like https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ or https://opensource.org/licenses, paste it into a new file called LICENSE, and commit it to your project.
Licensing in R
Licensing in R is a little different from other languages. As covered in the licensing page of the R Packages book…
- You list your license in the
DESCRIPTIONfile, e.g.,:
License: MIT + file LICENSE- You include a
LICENSEfile which contains year and copyright details:
YEAR: 2025
COPYRIGHT HOLDER: STARS Project Team- You can also have a
LICENSE.mdfile which contains the full text of the license (eqvuialent toLICENSEabove), but this gets ignored when building the package (add to.Rbuildignore).
The usethis package (e.g., use_mit_license()) can set this up for you.
You also can use the license format default with github described above etc. you just need to add to rebuildignore and dotdotdot
Explore the example models
Click to visit pydesrap_mms repository
Click to visit pydesrap_stroke repository
These repositories use MIT licenses (see LICENSE file).
Click to visit rdesrap_mms repository
Click to visit rdesrap_stroke repository
These repositories use MIT licenses (see LICENSE and LICENSE.md files, and note in DESCRIPTION).