[R] R licence

[peter dalgaard]

On Apr 7, 2011, at 09:45 , Stanislav Bek wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> is it possible to use some statistic computing by R in proprietary software?
> Our software is written in c#, and we intend to use
> http://rdotnet.codeplex.com/
> to get R work there. Especially we want to use loess function.

You need to take legal advice to be certain, but offhand I would say that this kind of circumvention of the GPL is _not_ allowed. 

It all depends on whether the end product is a "derivative work", in which case, the whole must be distributed under a GPL-compatible licence. The situation around GPL-incompatible plug-ins or plug-ins interfacing to R in GPL -incompatible software is legally murky, but using R as a subroutine library for proprietary code is clearly crossing the line, as far as I can tell.  

-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com