[R] Legality Question about R's Open Source GNU GPL License

[Gad Abraham]

> If your legal department is still concerned, have them look at the 
> license in Java.  It most likely is GPL (unless you have a special 
> commercial version of Java installed) and thus makes any Java program 
> you create subject to the GPL in Java due to the JIT compiler used in 
> Java.  If your legal department does not have a problem with Java, then 
> they should not have a problem with R.

This is conflating two issues, the license of the compiler/interpreter, 
and the license of the code you wrote in that language.

 From http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ_Update:

``Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free 
programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?

Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the 
code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on 
the license you use for your code.

Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical 
reasons--for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its 
output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by 
the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part 
of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the 
copyright status of the input.

As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs. This 
is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison standard 
parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We made the 
decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison which 
already permitted use for non-free programs.''


-- 
Gad Abraham
Dept. CSSE and NICTA
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia
email: gabraham at csse.unimelb.edu.au
web: http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham