The FSF clearly promulgated the GPL with the intent of prohibiting the bundling of GPL code with proprietary code. The way the GPL does this is by putting conditions on distribution: if you "distribute" a program "based on" a GPL program, the whole program must be licensed under the GPL.
Clearly, the crux of the matter is the meaning of "distribute" and "based on". The FSF takes a maximalist view of this, so that (for example) distributing R together with additional components (libraries / packages / whatever), even if they are in separate files and loaded dynamically, would require that the additional components be licensed under GPL (and therefore that their source be released). The additional libraries need not be derived works of the original; this is not a copyright issue, but a licensing issue. I am not a lawyer, so can't judge this professionally, but it seems to me that the copyright owner is within his rights to impose conditions like this on distribution -- just as he could arbitrarily decide that he will only license his code to people whose names begin with 'T'. The logic is not: "I require you to release your code under GPL" but: "I will only license my GPL code to you for this application if you release your code under GPL". On the other hand, the GPL explicitly allows *users* of the code to do what they want, including mixing it with proprietary code, as long as they don't distribute the result. And I do not believe the copyright holder has any way of preventing a third party from distributing *separately* code that can be run on top of R. In fact the FSF itself has been quite clear that they don't consider that the license for a language implementation restricts the code that can be run on top of it in any way. All that being said, the entity that must enforce these conditions is not the FSF, but the copyright owner, in this case the R Foundation and the copyright holders of any other packages redistributed by the bundler. So it would be useful to know what the R Foundation's position is. Regardless of what the license says, it is up to the R Foundation to decide what *its* interpretation of the license is and under what circumstances it would ask a distributor of its code to cease and desist -- and that failing, sue. -s ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel