[R-pkg-devel] Licensing of an R package

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Chris,

I am with Duncan here.

You can license _your_ package any way you want and prefer. I like GPL.

You seem to imply that the GPL license prohibits linking against commercial
code.  If that were the case we'd never have R, Emacs, gcc/g++, ... on
Windows or macOS or any of the now-essentially-extinct commercial Unux
flavours.  We alway link against their system libraries too.

Also look eg at our Rblpapi package.  The Bloomberg API is not open source,
but they allow distribution of the (pre-built) library and headers.  Our
package, building on top, is GPL-2+. No issues.  (This example is extra fun
because CRAN can't distribute the API, but can use it for building our
package. Using the package requires having a commercial and expensive
Bloomberg terminal license and installation.)

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org