[R] Legality Question about R's Open Source GNU GPL License

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 7/28/2008 2:32 PM, zerfetzen wrote:
> Hi,
> I use R at home, and am interested in using it at my work company (which is
> in the Fortune 100).  I began the request, and our legal team has given some
> gruff about the open source license.  Not boring you with the details here,
> but I used some info on gnu.org as a rebuttal, and someone at the company
> replied that the generalities of GNU GPL may differ from R's specific GNU
> GPL license, and that I should refer specifically to it, and it should be on
> the CRAN website.
> 
> I may be blind, but haven't seen such a document.  Does one exist, and how
> may I obtain it?  I believe they are wrong.  Our legal team is notorious for
> being overly conservative, and I'm personally betting they think I won't
> look into it, and then they won't have to deal with it.  But I will, and I
> want to use R.  Thanks.
> 
> PS
> Sorry if the document was posted and obvious, and I simply couldn't find it. 
> Thanks.

It is distributed with R, in the file COPYING. If you haven't installed 
R yet, you can get just that one file from

https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/COPYING

That is the current development version of R, but that particular file 
hasn't changed since January 2006, and even then it was only a trivial 
change to the address of the FSF.  The substance of the file hasn't 
changed since 1997, when our version tracking began.

Duncan Murdoch