[Rd] GPLv2-only code in R?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> 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.

And all of this in the COPYRIGHTS file for each version of R.

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595