Dear R-devel,

REvolution appear to be offering ParallelR only when bundled with their R Enterprise edition.  As such it appears to be non-free and closed source.
    http://www.revolution-computing.com/products/parallel-r.php

Since R is GPL and not LGPL, is this a breach of the GPL ?

Below is the "GPL and ParallelR" thread from their R forum.

mdowle >  It appears that ParallelR (packages foreach and iterators) is only available bundled with the Enterprise edition. Since R is GPL, and ParallelR is derived from R, should ParallelR not also be GPL?  Regards, Matthew

revolution > Hello Matthew,  ParallelR consists of both proprietary and GPL packages.  The randomForest and snow libraries GPL licensed, whereas the other libraries we include have a commercial license(including 'foreach' and 'iterators').  Stephen Weller

revolution > I wanted to expand on Stephen's reply. ParallelR is a suite of R packages, and it is well established that packages can be under a difference license than R itself (i.e. not the GPL). For example, package MCE is licensed under BSD, RColorBrewer is licensed under Apache, most of Bioconductor is under the Artistic license and some are under completely unique licenses (e.g. mclust). REvolution Computing developed all of the code in ParallelR (except for the bundled GPL packages Stephen mentions), and we decided to release it under our own license in REvolution R Enterprise.
That said, we do already release components of parallelR, such as the underlying engine, Networkspaces (also written by REvolution Computing) under an open source licence. Also, we are likely to release some other components including foreach and iterators, to CRAN soon.
David Smith
Director of Community, REvolution Computing 

mdowle > The examples you give (MCE, RColorBrewer, Bioconductor) are all available for free including the source code. Their licenses have been approved by the FSF. Free software and open source are the terms of work derived from GPL licensed software. REvolution's packages 'foreach' and 'iterators' are neither free or open source.  Can you provide a precedent for proprietary closed-source packages for R ?  Is your policy approved by the FSF ?
I don't object to REvolution. I am a fan of you making money from training courses, consultancy, support and binaries. These are all permitted by the GPL. However the GPL does not allow you to distribute work derived from R which is either closed source or non-free.
R is GPL, not LGPL.
The above is my personal understanding. I am now posting to r-devel to check, feel free to join the public debate there.

Regards, Matthew

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