[Rd] commercial software selling a R module - question about GPL license rights

[Philippe Grosjean]

Hello all,

Sorry for this email not directly related to R developement. I just come 
from a nice demonstration session from Scitegic about their Pipeline 
Pilot (PP) software, and especially their 'R collection' which brings R 
calculations into the software 
(http://www.scitegic.com/documents/RStats_Collection.pdf).

I looked carefully on the way they do it: they pass data from PP to R 
using text files, they call R.exe using a R script and input - output 
files, like:

R.exe --nosave --no-environ --no-resore-data < script.R > output.txt

And in the script, you have:

read.table(...)

which imports the data just exported from PP in an CVS file by the 
component. I don't want to discuss here the ugly and extremely 
inefficient solution they use to call R on their data, but anyway...

So far, so good, they respect the GPL license since R is not embedded 
into PP, and you have to download and install it separately.

But they also provide a series of "R component" ready to use like 'R 
ANOVA', 'R PCA', R Neural Net', etc... which are basically R scripts 
with replaceable variables (replacement is done by PP before feeding the 
script to the R engine). For instance, you will have:

parameter <- $(PPvariable)

in the R script. In the PP component, you have an option to specify the 
value of 'PPvariable', let's say: PPvariable = 10, and the replacement 
done in the R script is:

parameter <- 10

before to feed this script to R. So, everything appears transparent to 
the end-user who parameterizes the scripts from within the PP GUI. That 
is what they call "each component generates an R script on-the-fly"... 
(sic!)

However, I was suprised to learn that the Pipeline Pilot R Collection is 
not GPL and is not free (in term of money, i.e., you have to pay 
3500$/year to use it). I am not sure, but I think they break the GPL 
license here since they use a commercial license for, basically, a 
collection of R scripts embedded in their 'PP components'.

Anyone with better expertise than me could look at this, please?

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

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( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium
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