[Rd] Closed-source non-free ParallelR ?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Ted Harding
<Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 23-Apr-09 22:21:45, Ian Fellows wrote:
>> Assuming that the foundation does not want to deviate from the
>> FSF interpretation, there would still be value in clarifying its
>> position vis-à-vis how the license applies to R specifically.
>
> I think (see below) that I agree with this!
>
>> For example the FSF foundation claims that linking to a library
>> (even in an interpreted environment) makes your software derivative,
>> and therefore must be distributed Freely. They also claim that
>> simply executing a program in an interpreted (GPL'ed) environment
>> is okay even though the program could not be run without it. So one
>> question might be, where does the language end and the libraries
>> begin?
>
> As far as I Understand these things (and I think I use language
> differently from lawyers), it seems to me that this view about
> executing a program in an interpreted environment is reasonable.
>
> For example, suppose I bought a commercial FORTRAN interpreter.
> I write a program (plain text, of course) in standard FORTRAN.
> Running this on the interpreter surely would not tie me into
> any licensing issues arising from the rights of the seller of
> the interpreter, and I feel sure I could re-distribute my raw
> (test) FORTRAN code as I pleased without any infringement arising
> from the fact that I had, myself, executed it on the interpreter.
> Others (and I myself) could surely compile the program on some
> other compiler, etc.
>
> However, if that commercial interpreter also had a 'compile' option,
> and I compiled my progrtam using that, then equally I feel sure
> that the compiled version would be subject to whatever restrictions
> had been placed on distirbution fo binaries so compiled. I think
> those things are clear enough.

Typically commercial compilers have royalty-free runtime
libraries so you can freely distribute software processed
with the compiler.  Similarly, In the free software world,
gcc has the gcc Runtime Library Exception to allow
commercial software to use gcc.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html