I know the standard answer to this kind of question is "get legal advice from a lawyer", but I would like to hear the (hopefully informed) opinion of other people.
I would say that, according to the FSF's interpretation of the GPL, any R code using GPL packages can be distributed legally only using GPL-compatible licenses. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL > Another similar and very common case is to provide libraries with the > interpreter which are themselves interpreted. For instance, Perl comes > with many Perl modules, and a Java implementation comes with many Java > classes. These libraries and the programs that call them are always > dynamically linked together. > > A consequence is that if you choose to use GPL'd Perl modules or Java > classes in your program, you must release the program in a > GPL-compatible way, regardless of the license used in the Perl or Java > interpreter that the combined Perl or Java program will run on. If the reasoning above applies to R as it does to Perl, all R code would be affected given that core packages like "base" are GPL. The interpretation of the R Foundation (the copyright holder in this case) seems more relaxed, but I wonder what is the intent of other people distributing R packages under the GPL. Maybe some of them would protest if R code using their package was distributed under a non-GPL-compatible license. For example, I would expect the authors of the GNU Scientific Library to defend that any package using "gsl" (a wrapper on their GPL library) should be published under a GPL-compatible license, being a derivative work (the FSF thinks so). Another question is if that "strict" interpretation of the GPL could be actually enforced, of course. Coming back to the GSL example, it seems a more flagrant violation of the license is already happening: http://www.numerit.com/gsl.htm (apparently the publisher of that product thinks that linking to a GPL dll doesn't impose any obligation to him, but the usual view of the FSF is quite the opposite; I just found that page by chance, I don't know anything else about that particular case). I've noticed that this question was posed in r-devel a couple of years ago, I'm surprised it didn't provoke more than one reply: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-September/042715.html Cheers, Carlos PS: By the way, I think FAQ 2.11 should be fixed: it states that "R is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL)", without specifying the version and linking to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html (GPLv3). However, the COPYING file in the R directory corresponds to GPL2. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/licensing-of-R-packages-tp20497391p20497391.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
