[R] possible to use the program for commercial reasons?

[Marc Schwartz]

> On Mar 21, 2016, at 6:44 AM, Felix Töpfer <f.toepfer at komet.net> wrote:
> 
> Dear R-Team,
> 
> I am a scientist actually working in parallel as data analyst for an advertisment auditing company. Therefore i would use your software for commercial reasons right now. Is this allowed, o rare there special licences?
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Felix T�pfer
> B�roassistenz

Hi,

See this FAQ:

  https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Can-I-use-R-for-commercial-purposes_003f

There are a significant number of R users in a commercial/for-profit setting, me being one of them. There is nothing in the R license that prevents you from *using* R in a commercial setting.

There are a limited number of third party add-on packages that are on CRAN however, that do have non-commercial use only restrictions, so just be aware of that.

The GPL, which is the license under which R is released and referenced in the above FAQ, has certain requirements if you wish to copy/distribute R and/or if you develop code which "links" to R in certain ways and wish to copy/distribute that work. If this is your use case, you should consult legal counsel familiar with open source licenses, since there can be requirements that would require you to make your source code available.

Regards,

Marc