[Rd] GPLv2-only code in R?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 27/04/2011 12:55 PM, Brett Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm sending this to R-devel under the guideline that the ensuing
> discussion would probably be unintelligible to people who aren't
> programmers.  If that's not right, I apologize.
>
> <http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/>  says in part: "Some files are
> licensed under 'GPL (version 2 or later)', which includes GPL-3. See the
> comments in the files to see if this applies."  This implies that there
> are files in R that do *not* have the "or later" language, and can only
> be used under GPLv2.
>
> I've done some initial searches for files in the R source code that
> don't have the "or later" language, but haven't turned anything up yet.
>    If anybody knows of any off-hand and could point me to them, I'd
> appreciate it.

Package rpart is GPL-2-only in R 2.13.0, but is more liberally licensed 
in R-patched and R-devel.  The survival package was GPL-2-only until R 
2.12.1.

Duncan Murdoch