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

[Cyrus Harmon]

But its value to you and whether or not you would pay for it is a  
completely separate matter from whether or not they are violating the  
R license by selling their R collection. I imagine a discussion of  
the latter is on-topic for this list, less so for the former, I'd  
imagine.

Cyrus

On Apr 19, 2006, at 11:45 AM, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

> 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.
>>
>
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