[R] How can you buy R?

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 5/21/06, Berwin A Turlach <berwin at maths.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> G'day Deepayan,
>
> >>>>> "DS" == Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com> writes:
>
>     DS> A user can never violate the GPL. The GPL does not govern use,
>     DS> it governs distribution. Specifically,
> As I said, I stopped reading gnu.misc.discuss long time ago, but if I
> remember correctly sometimes in the (early?) '90s the following case
> was discussed.
>
> A company made a binary module available for download and gave the
> instructions "go to the FSF site (or a mirror), download version X.Y.Z
> of program U and compile it with these options, then link our module
> and start the program, now you can use these features of ours and are
> in business".  (Remember, these were the days when most "free"
> software was only available in .tar.gz form, people were used to
> compile their own software and slackware was the dominant (only?)
> linux distribution, no .rpm or .deb files.)
>
> Note also that they did not distribute any GPL code, they said go and
> get it.  As far as I remember, they were told by the FSF that they
> cannot do this and had to stop.  And, IIRC, the argument was that
> whether they did the linking or let the end user do the linking was
> the same and, hence, the GPL was violated.

I'll readily concede that my interpretation may be flawed, but this
example doesn't seem to contradict anything I said. This binary module
was clearly (in the opinion of the FSF) a derivative work of something
that was GPL, and hence the company was violating the GPL by
distributing the binary module under a license other than the GPL.
Whether it was truly a derivative work (which would depend on how the
'linking' was done) may be in contention, but that's not the issue
here. Also, as far as I can tell, your description applies to the
situation with Nvidia's binary kernel drivers for the Linux kernel
(which is GPL and not LGPL AFAIK), which is obviously tolerated, so
there must have been some other nuances.

In any case, this is the complete opposite of the situation we were
originally discussing: there one wants to distribute a GPL-d module
that possibly links into a proprietary system. As far as I can tell,
the example you quoted above has no relevance in this situation.

-Deepayan

> But it is quite possible that the argument was based on other sections
> of the GPL.  And, obviously, there must be some mechanism in the GPL
> that prohibits the above procedure, otherwise it would be very easy to
> circumvent the GPL.  (This idea of circumventing the GPL was regularly
> floated on gnu.misc.discuss while I followed it.)
>
> Cheers,
>
>         Berwin