Have the lawyers look at Microsoft R, it seems the license is not very catching ultimately.
Perhaps you could use a similar ruse, or even align to that project instead. Cheers, Mike On Sat, Mar 25, 2017, 00:54 Mario Emmenlauer <ma...@emmenlauer.de> wrote: > > Dear All, > > I've been following this mailing list for over three years now, but > its just now that I have realized that R is licensed under GPL! :-) > > I'm not a lawyer and I don't want lawyer advice, but I'd like to get > your feedback on a license question. My goal is to develop commercial > software for image analysis of biomedical samples that may be used > i.e. in academic institutions. Since I've been an academic software > developer for long, a priority for me is to make the data and tools > easily accessibly for other developers. I have toyed with the idea to > make a (free) R package that can very efficiently fetch data from the > database and push back results for visualization. To clarify: I am > not using R in my software. I'd rather like the institutions of my > customers to have open (internal) access to their data. > > Now for the question: To efficiently get the data into R, I assume a > package (possibly in C or C++) is the most reasonable way? If yes, > would such a package automatically be infected by the GPL? If the > package links to (proprietary closed source) libraries to efficiently > access the data, would the libraries in turn be infected? > > I'm asking this very naiively because I understand statement [1] in > such a way that it is generally encouraged to make data available in > R. Obviously open source is the preferred way, but my understanding > is that also closed source extensions can add value and may be > welcome. > > I was therefore hoping that somebody has prior experience in this > regard, or can shed further light on statement [1]. Is the R-C- > interface infectious per se, even when data flows only into R, not > vice versa? If its infectious, could just the very core of R be > licensed additionally under a non-infectious license? > > Furthermore, can I avoid infecting my full software stack, for example > by making only the package open source under a permissive license? Are > there any guidelines how to legally bridge between the proprietary and > the R-world? I guess other people have tried this before, can someone > share his/her experience? > > [1] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-May/053248.html > > All the best, > > Mario Emmenlauer > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > -- Dr. Michael Sumner Software and Database Engineer Australian Antarctic Division 203 Channel Highway Kingston Tasmania 7050 Australia [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel