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

[Gavin Simpson]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 21:05 +0530, ohri2007 at gmail.com wrote:
> now which license to use?

Use whatever you or your company want to use. As long as it is in
compliance with GPL2 (as that is the licence R currently uses) then you
are fine. As to whether what you intend to do is in compliance with the
GPL2, then you'll find only lay-person comments on this list (as far as
I know there are know lawyers lurking on the list that have raised their
heads...), some informed because they have gone through similar
procedures in their work place/business and others less well informed.

If this is really important to you/your business, then consult a lawyer.

R Core are not lawyers and as such you won't see them contributing to
threads like this, other than to answer the basics (e.g. the "what
licence is R released under" type question).

> 
> it is bad enough explaining SaaS (software as a service), and open
> source and data mining to lawyers, without the experts fighting it as
> well.

I doubt anyone contributing to this thread would call themselves an
expect in this field, and they are not fighting, just offering opinions
- but I wouldn't base my business model on these opinions on GPL,
licensing etc. You need a lawyer for that, preferably one that is
familiar with the computing industry and software licences. This list is
not the place to solicit such advice, as you have found out.

G

> 
> and who pays for the cloud computing expenses  for me then if there is
> no money in it. cloud computing doesnt exist in India right now from
> where I am writing this?
> 
> regards,
> 
> ajay
> decisionstats.com
> 
> On 7/30/08, Roland Rau <roland.rproject at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Stevens, Martin Henry H. Dr. wrote:
> >> The limit of use is that you cannot profit from it. It is Open Source.
> >
> > I am not sure what you mean exactly. If you mean that you can not earn
> > any money selling free software (in terms of the GPL2, which is R's
> > licence), this seems to be not the case:
> > http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/selling.html
> >
> > Best,
> > Roland
> >
> 
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