[R] How can you buy R?

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 5/22/06, Berwin A Turlach <berwin at maths.uwa.edu.au> wrote:

[...]

> Thus, the last sentence of mine that you quoted:
>
>          My understanding was that in that moment a product was
>          created that would have to be wholly under the GPL, so the
>          user was violating the GPL and lost the write to use your
>          package.
>
> Should perhaps better be formulated as:
>
>          My understanding was that in that moment a product was
>          created that would have to be wholly under the GPL, so the
>          person who did the linking was violating the GPL and it is
>          not clear whether anyone is allowed to use the linked product.

I think you are still missing the point. The act of creating a
derivative work is NOT governed by the GPL, so it cannot possibly by
itself violate the GPL. The question of violation only applies when
the creator of this derivative work wishes to _distribute_ it. This is
like me writing a book that no one else ever reads; it doesn't matter
if I have plagiarized huge parts of it. This point is not as academic
as you might think. It is well known that Google uses a customized
version of Linux for their servers; however, they do not distribute
this customized version, and hence are under no obligation to provide
the changes (and they do not, in fact). This is NOT a violation of the
GPL.

>     DS> I was referring to your question (quoted above) about use of
>     DS> GPL'd code in S-PLUS, which is what I was replying to. As I
>     DS> was saying, that situation is the opposite of the one in your
>     DS> example.
> O.k., sorry, I used a different scale with the time point of origin at
> Spencer's e-mail and my answer to that mail.  Now I am with you.
>
> Agreed, the situation is the opposite, but that was the example
> discussed in gnu.misc.discuss.  From an abstract point of view the
> situations are the same.  You make someone else link a GPL product
> with a non-GPL product creating a derived work, the derived work would
> have to be under the GPL but is not.  Hence, the derived work has a
> legal status that is in limbo and it is not clear whether anyone has
> to right to use it.
>
> The discussions on gnu.misc.discuss were centred on cases were people
> provided non-GPL binaries, asked their users to download GPL software
> from elsewhere, compile and link everything together and then use the
> combined product.
>
> As you say it is the exact opposite (and hence mirror image) from the
> situation that I was worried about, where I provide GPL software and
> ask others to compile and link it with non-GPL binaries and then use
> the combined product.
>
> If one scenario is not on, I don't see how the other one could be
> acceptable either.  Except that in the first scenario there is a clear
> intend of circumventing the GPL.  But I was not sure whether such kind
> of intent makes any difference.  Thus, to avoid all these problems I
> decided to rather use the LGPL since that licence definitely seemed to
> allow both.

That's your choice, but the situations are not symmetric, and quite
deliberately so. The FSF's plan was not to produce a completely
independent and fully functional 'GNU system' at once (which would be
unrealistic), but rather produce replacements of UNIX tools one by
one. It was entirely necessary to allow these new versions to operate
within the older, proprietary system. In fact, GCC was not the first
piece of software released under the GPL, and until then the only way
to use GPL software was to compile them using a non-free compiler.
This is enabled by means of exceptions to the GPL, as described in

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs

(which I have already referred to once before).

Deepayan