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

[Philippe Grosjean]

I understand that it is difficult to make the distinction between 
"linking" and "derived work". Whatever the conclusion, I always feel a 
little bit abused when someone wants to "sell" me R somehow (here, you 
have to pay 3500$/year to use R inside of Pipeline Pilot). I would 
accept to pay this money if I was in front of R experts that sell me 
their expertise, indeed. But this is not the case: they don't know much 
about R, and they made a really ugly and inefficient interface between 
PP and R that is not worth those 3500$/year.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>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?
> 
> 
> Offhand, I don't think this is a problem.
> 
> We've discussed a few similar cases. Things are sometimes slightly
> murky due to the FSF's unclear (or undecided) definition of the
> relation between "linking" and "derived work". However, it was never
> the intention that GPL code could not be _used_ by non-free software.
> That point might get clearer if you substitute mySql or a similar
> database instead of R.
> 
> There are some limitations though. In particular if the connection is
> so tight that R has become an integrated part of the application, then
> the rules for derived works may apply.
>