Howdy all... Reading with interest the thread(s) about REvolution, package licensing and the requirements of the GPL.
First of all, let me introduce myself . I joined REvolution Computing in February, after working for nearly 4 years for Intel as an open source strategist and before that for 6 years at Sun, where I established the first corporate open source programs office. I'm a Member of the Apache Software Foundation and serve on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla.org. I'm also a long-time supporter of the Free Software Foundation and have served on the board of the Open Source Initiative since 2001. I joined REvolution partly to help them sort out their open source strategy. So presumably I know a little bit about licensing. Part of why I joined REvolution was because it was so clear that they *really* care about being members in good standing of the R community, and had already given back several packages and 100% of their mods to Core R. In general REvolution thinks of its self as a "commercial open source" company, which means that they hope to do well while doing good...by adding needed functionality and reach to R, professionalizing support and training for R and in general getting a bigger slice by making the whole R pizza bigger. My first interview question to REvolution's CEO was the same one all of you have been asking. "Have you checked with legal counsel about your package licensing strategy?" and the answer was "Of course we have."..."Who are your lawyers?" was my next question and the answer was "Well, we asked the Software Freedom Law Center ." What the SFLC essentially said was that packages designed to run through the R interpreter don't necessarily have to be licensed under the GPL. Obviously, changes to Core R do need to be under GPL. and REvolution has always done that. The R community has a long-standing practice of allowing packages to be distributed in CRAN under licenses other than the GPL. What really influences package licensing is market forces. If REvolution or XL Solutions or any other company in the R space creates an innovative commercial package that everybody loves, its only a matter of time until that package will be imitated with an open source package, so there is a brief commercial life for any R package. That said, REvolution is working that commercial innovation space, while seeding key packages into open source all the time. So there is a version of NWS (the guts of ParallelR) available now under GPL. Internal discussions about when to open other packages relating to ParallelR are currently underway. I'm satisfied that REvolution is very aware of and has been thinking about licensing questions since their beginning and that we will continue to work as a member of the larger R community to expand the reach and utility of R. -- Danese Cooper Open Source Diva REvolution Computing One Century Tower | 265 Church Street, Suite 1006 New Haven, CT 06510 P: 408-348-8000 | www.revolution-computing.com Check out our upcoming events schedule at www.revolution-computing.com/events ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
