`rFVS` and `fvsOL` declare `License: MIT`, which conflicts with the public-domain statement the FVS engine repo carries

[d-diaz]

Summary

Both DESCRIPTION files in this repo declare:

License: MIT

USDAForestService/ForestVegetationSimulator declares the opposite in its license.txt (dated May 20, 2022):

Materials produced by employees of the United States Federal Government as part of their official duties are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under United States law and are therefore in the U.S. public domain. The Forest Vegetation Simulator is free and open-source software. It is released without any conditions upon its use, and is available to everyone without restriction.

It seems like the same reasoning in the ForestVegetationSimulator repo applies here, and there is no U.S. copyright for rFVS nor fvsOL for an MIT grant to operate on.

This repo also has no LICENSE file, which is a separate problem: License: MIT in a DESCRIPTION is only valid as MIT + file LICENSE with a LICENSE file naming the copyright holder and year. R CMD check flags the current form.

Suggested fix

1. Add a LICENSE (or license.txt) at the repo root. Copying the USDAForestService/ForestVegetationSimulator/license.txt would make the two repos consistent and reuses text that has presumably already been reviewed — including its carve-out for embedded third-party open-source components, which this repo also needs given fvsOL's CRAN dependency stack.

2. Change both DESCRIPTION files from License: MIT to whichever of these make the most sense:

   Value	When it fits
   License: file LICENSE	Public domain. Unambiguous, and carries the actual statement rather than an SPDX token that implies a copyright grant
   License: CC0	Public domain, but you want a machine-readable identifier. CC0 is on CRAN's accepted list, and works as a belt-and-braces dedication for jurisdictions where § 105 does not reach

3. Create a CONTRIBUTING.md for this repo that clarifies any contributions to it will enter the public domain in the US and be dedicated to CC0 worldwide. Here is an example.

Context

Raised while building a container that pairs the FVS shared libraries with rFVS for a workshop on programmatic access to FVS from R and Python. Packaging that image means declaring a license for its contents, and the FVS and FVS-interface repos currently point in different directions. Happy to open the PR for whichever outcome you land on.