On 06/11/2014 9:49 AM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> 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.
Yes, that's right. We often enter lines like
Copyright (C) 1997--2014 The R Core Team
into the sources, but I suspect that those don't legally imply a
copyright transfer, at least where I live.
Duncan Murdoch
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