> Theoretically you could ask the copyright holder of that piece of code > whether he/she/it allows you to use a different license. This brings up > another question: who is formally the copyright holder of the R source code > (and documentation)? The R Foundation, the individual who contributed the > code in the first place, or someone else? You could certainly imagine a > case where a piece of code was donated to R by someone, e.g. the code > originates from a user-contributed package and has not been modified since. > It may even be that that code was licensed under another license at the > time.
Unless a contributor signs a contributor license agreement, the copyright belongs to the original author. I don't think that the R-foundation is in the practice of requiring these, so the the copyright of R itself will be a mismash of many different people. This is can be seen as a good thing because it makes it impossible to re-license code away from the GPL. Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
