[R] Legal issue help

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 23/06/2013 12:59, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
> On 23.06.2013 01:50, Dr. T. Imam wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am new to this forum, and hopefully am sending the post to the right
>> avenue (and in the appropriate format).
>>
>> I am planning to prepare a (to be commercially sold) book in near future,
>> in which I expect to use some screenshots from R (running on Windows),
>> and
>> also graphic outputs from some of the packages..
>>
>> I am just wondering are there any legal requirements (in respect to
>> copyright/permission of use issue) involved for such commercial use?.
>
>
> We do not give legal advice.
>
> Nevertheless, R is licensed under the GPL 2 or GPL 3. You have to look
> up the license situations for the used packages yourself.
> Both, the authors of R and the package would probably appreciate if you
> cite the software you used. See ?citation in R.
>
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges

Correct.

But one other comment.  There are books containing screenshots 
(including old editions of mine) and they do go out-of-date very 
quickly: they will also baffle users of other OSes (possibly including 
other versions of Windows: screenshots from Windows XP look odd to those 
who have never used it).   I would recommend confining them to online 
supplementary material.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595