[R] Question

[Marc Schwartz]

On Jan 24, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Taylor, Brian wrote:

> We were looking at conducting a pilot program with Dell to virtualize our lab environments.  We are specifically looking at Dell/Citrix provisioning servers.  The OS in this setup is streamed from the server on every boot.  I was curious if the R Project had any licensing stipulations in this type of setup.  This is in the beginning phases and we wanted to answer some questions about licensing.  I've heard a lot of other universities have hit road blocks with licensing and we were hoping to get some of these questions answered early on. Thanks.


R is licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License), so there are no functional restrictions on use, only subsequent distribution.

My understanding of the scenario you are describing is that you have some number of diskless workstations, connected to a network server providing the operating system and applications to the workstations via a Citrix service upon boot of the workstations. You would just need to be sure that R is part of the virtual disk image provided to each client workstation.

I don't see any issues there, so I am not sure what licensing issues that are relevant to R are being raised by the other universities.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz