I'm not the authority on this but a release from an ASF project is different from releasing with the Apache 2.0 license.
You can find more out this here https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#optional Specifically, quote: "Optional means that the component is not required for standard use of the product or for the product to achieve a desirable level of quality." Basically my interpretation is that if an ASF project cannot function without a component, then it is required and such required component cannot be one of the prohibited licenses. https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x Probably a good idea to start a thread with legal@ if there are more questions. _____________________________ From: Qiang Kou <q...@umail.iu.edu<mailto:q...@umail.iu.edu>> Sent: Thursday, July 6, 2017 3:41 PM Subject: Re: Rcpp licensing in Apache MXNet To: <dev@mxnet.incubator.apache.org<mailto:dev@mxnet.incubator.apache.org>> Hi, Felix, I just want to make sure there is no misunderstanding between us. (1) The MXNet R package heavily used the Rcpp package, but we only include the header file, Rcpp.h, like https://github.com/dmlc/mxnet/ blob/master/R-package/src/base.h#L11 The MXNet R package doesn't contain any source code from Rcpp and there is no linking against Rcpp. (2) There is "LinkingTo: Rcpp" in the R package description ( https://github.com/dmlc/mxnet/blob/master/R-package/DESCRIPTION#L32). However, this only means we want to use the header files from Rcpp. "A package that wishes to make use of header files in other packages needs to declare them as a comma-separated list in the field ‘LinkingTo’ in the DESCRIPTION file. " More details can be found from R's official manual ( https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts. html#Package-Dependencies). (3) Many R packages who use Rcpp to communicate with C++ have been released under Apache License, like feather (https://github.com/wesm/ feather/blob/master/R/DESCRIPTION). Best, Qiang Kou On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 1:20 AM, Felix Cheung <felixcheun...@hotmail.com<mailto:felixcheun...@hotmail.com>> wrote: > On a related note, Rcpp, used extensively in the R package, is GPLv2/GPLv3 > licensed. > > I'm not aware of any other R package available that supports R<->C++. > > https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x > https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rcpp/index.html > >
