Generate a LICENSE file

Writes a plain-text LICENSE file at the project root, using one of a small set of common license templates with the copyright holder and year filled in.

Usage

generate_license(
  license = "MIT",
  holder = NULL,
  year = format(Sys.Date(), "%Y"),
  path = ".",
  overwrite = FALSE
)

Arguments

license: A character string. One of "MIT", "CC0", or "GPL-3". Only this small, common set is supported; write a LICENSE file by hand for anything else. Defaults to "MIT".
holder: A character string. The copyright holder – a person or an institution. Must be supplied explicitly; there is no default, since guessing it wrong is worse than asking.
year: A character string. The copyright year. Defaults to the current year.
path: A character string. Directory in which to write the file. Defaults to "." (the current working directory).
overwrite: Logical. If TRUE, overwrites an existing LICENSE file at the same location. Defaults to FALSE.

Value

Invisibly returns the full path to the written file.

Details

Note that this is different from how an R package normally carries a license. A package's DESCRIPTION declares License: MIT + file LICENSE and pairs a two-line CRAN stub (LICENSE) with the full text in a separate LICENSE.md. The projects init_project() scaffolds are research compendia, not packages – there is no DESCRIPTION to reference a license from – so generate_license() instead writes one self-contained file carrying the license text directly, the way a plain GitHub repository does.

GPL-3

The GNU General Public License's full text runs to several hundred lines. Rather than risk an inaccurate transcription of it, license = "GPL-3" writes the license notice the Free Software Foundation itself recommends attaching to a program, together with a link to the canonical full text at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt. "MIT" and "CC0" are both short enough to reproduce here in full, and are written that way.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
generate_license(license = "MIT", holder = "Jane Researcher")

generate_license(license = "CC0", holder = "Example Lab",
                  path = "~/Documents/my-project")
} # }