[Rd] Holding back on source code

[Dominick Samperi]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 27/11/2011 23:07, Sachinthaka Abeywardana wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> A few years back when I was a CSIRO (an Australian research centre) intern
>> I developed a BLAS package for R that uses the GPU. I believe that there
>> is
>> something similar right now, except it uses a few CuBLAS (Nvidia BLAS)
>> routines, but doesnt replace them.
>
> We haven't much idea what 'something similar' refers to.
>
>> My question is, is it technically illegal to hold back on source code?
>
> It depends entirely on the licenses involved.  Nothing prevents Adobe
> distributing Acrobat without source code, for example.
>
> This is the R development list: questions not specific to R are best asked
> elsewhere (and, to take a recent example, that includes questions about
> licenses of packages on R-forge or CRAN).  'Elsewhere' may mean an IP
> lawyer.

One side-effect of R's GPL-based license is that there are many
Copyright holders
if you include members of the R core, R Foundation, R package
contributors, etc., and
any discussion (with an IP lawyer, say) about possible violation of
license terms would
require input from each of these groups.

Perhaps a new mailing list R-license-policy would be helpful...

Dominick

>> Thanks,
>> Sachin
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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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
>
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