[Rd] non-infectious license for R package?

[Marc Schwartz]

See inline...

> On Mar 24, 2017, at 8:52 AM, Mario Emmenlauer <mario at emmenlauer.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> I've been following this mailing list for over three years now, but
> its just now that I have realized that R is licensed under GPL! :-)
> 
> I'm not a lawyer and I don't want lawyer advice, but I'd like to get
> your feedback on a license question.


Hi, 

With the usual IANAL caveat and that I am not speaking on behalf of any other parties:

The questions you are posing will require legal advice, so your desire above to not get legal advice is in direct conflict with what you actually need here.

To your comments below, you cannot change existing licenses on software, R or otherwise. That is only something that the copyright holder(s) can do and you are not one of them.

The GPL has a FAQ here:

  https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html>

that you may find enlightening.

A very general statement, which is that if your compiled code (in whatever language) does not "link" against R's libraries and does not directly contain GPL licensed code (e.g. copying and pasting R Foundation copyrighted source code into yours), that is one way to steer clear of the viral part of the GPL license vis-a-vis R, if you want to, but not the only way and not a guarantee either. There can be nuances, some of which are covered in the FAQ above.

On the other hand, if your compiled code is linking to R's libraries, which you seem to suggest may be the case below, then your code, at least the relevant parts of it, will need to be licensed under a GPL compatible license.

This again is part of the nuance, in terms of the scope of the impact on your code (all or parts) and where legal advice is needed, to steer clear of downstream potential issues that could result in legal and financial liabilities for you.

The issue of linking to third party proprietary libraries is something that you will have to evaluate with respect to their licenses and any limitations that they may impose on your code and it's licensing.

Since you seem to also be suggesting that you may use closed source components in your package, you should be aware, that vis-a-vis CRAN, you would not be able to submit your package for distribution via that channel, since CRAN submissions may not contain pre-compiled binaries or similar and the entire package must conform to a compatible open source license. Thus, if you go down that path, you would have to find other distribution channels for your package, such as a company web site, etc.

None of the above should be construed as legal advice and if you plan to go down the path of offering a commercial service that you would charge clients for, a lawyer is mandatory to provide legal guidance and to assess your business risks. Even if your actual R related package is offered free of charge, while generating revenue through other means, if you should run afoul of software licensing requirements, that can still leave you open to financial liabilities and put your business and even personal assets at risk.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz


> My goal is to develop commercial
> software for image analysis of biomedical samples that may be used
> i.e. in academic institutions. Since I've been an academic software
> developer for long, a priority for me is to make the data and tools
> easily accessibly for other developers. I have toyed with the idea to
> make a (free) R package that can very efficiently fetch data from the
> database and push back results for visualization. To clarify: I am
> not using R in my software. I'd rather like the institutions of my
> customers to have open (internal) access to their data.
> 
> Now for the question: To efficiently get the data into R, I assume a
> package (possibly in C or C++) is the most reasonable way? If yes,
> would such a package automatically be infected by the GPL? If the
> package links to (proprietary closed source) libraries to efficiently
> access the data, would the libraries in turn be infected?
> 
> I'm asking this very naiively because I understand statement [1] in
> such a way that it is generally encouraged to make data available in
> R. Obviously open source is the preferred way, but my understanding
> is that also closed source extensions can add value and may be
> welcome.
> 
> I was therefore hoping that somebody has prior experience in this
> regard, or can shed further light on statement [1]. Is the R-C-
> interface infectious per se, even when data flows only into R, not
> vice versa? If its infectious, could just the very core of R be
> licensed additionally under a non-infectious license?
> 
> Furthermore, can I avoid infecting my full software stack, for example
> by making only the package open source under a permissive license? Are
> there any guidelines how to legally bridge between the proprietary and
> the R-world? I guess other people have tried this before, can someone
> share his/her experience?
> 
> [1] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-May/053248.html
> 
> All the best,
> 
>    Mario Emmenlauer
> 

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