The modules in Revolution R are open sourced. Does the R license imply that I can use the R packages that comes with it free of charge? [closed]

Question

I noticed that in the library folder of my Revolution R installation that there are some packages unique to Revolution. So I copied them to my regular R distribution and those packages worked fine.

Can I use the Revolution packages free of charge in a commercial environment? My understanding is that anyone who contributes to R needs to make their efforts open source under GPL so anyone can use it and change it in under any setting. Please help me understand this. Thanks

Answer 1

This is a tricky area perhaps best left to the lawyers. But even by the free software foundation (FSF) strict interpretation of the GPL, this sort of thing is allowed. S is a programming language, and R is an interpreter of that language. The FSF foundation then argues that the program is just data with regards to the interpreter, and thus constitutes a separate work (from a copyright perspective). Therefore, it is not bound by the GPL. see: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL

The R core team concurs with this, and at one point released a statement on R-dev that alternative licenses for R packages are allowed. In fact on CRAN you will see a wide variety of licensing terms, some of which are not 'free' (i.e. optmatch).

It is another matter if Revolution's R packages depend on other (non-base) packages released under GPL (I don't know if they do). The FSF would argue that the packages would be bound by the GPL, but other legal scholars would disagree. I asked Stallman at the UseR! conference whether he thought it was likely that this would be tested in a court of law anytime soon, which is the only way to settle this sort of thing, and he said no.

Answer 2

This sounds like a legal issue. Furthermore, it sounds like a GPL-specific question. But... Revolution Analytics do contribute to R - they've already made thousands of insertions to the source code, so they ARE contributing. They build proprietary components upon GPL licensed source code - method known as an open core model. Because of the source modifications, Revolution R is one step behind "an official" R version (Revolution R Community version 3.2 is based on R 2.10.1 sources, while current R version is 2.11.1).

As Ian already stated, you can use community packages for commercial projects, while the Enterprise modifications are not free (as in no freedom and no free beer). Intel MKL library is an example of such proprietary component. Please read GNU GPL version 2, June 1991 (run RShowDoc("COPYING") in an interactive session). Be sure to check this link, as well as this one.