Can I suggest that we bring the discussion back to rpy2? People have been
arguing about the abstract merits of different licenses for decades, and
we're not going to resolve that debate here.
R is GPL licensed, while most of the Python ecosystem in which people use
rpy2 uses BSD style licenses. I'd argue that it doesn't make sense for rpy2
to use a less permissive license (AGPL) than either of the things it
connects. AGPL was also designed for things running as web services, and
while rpy2 can be used on a website, it's not the typical way to use it.
There's a question over whether the GPL license applied to R requires rpy2
to be GPL licensed as well. In my opinion, the intent of the GPL does cover
rpy2, whether or not the letter of it does. The FSF reckons that dynamic
linking is enough to create a 'combined work':
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic
However, by my reading, that does not prevent the rpy2 source code (apart
from any parts which are derived from R's code) being dual licensed with a
more permissive license, such as BSD or LGPL. This would make it easier to
share code with other scientific Python projects. For instance, rpy2 has
recently adopted rmagic from IPython, which is BSD licensed, but as it
stands, any code we wanted to move the other way would need to be
explicitly relicensed, with agreement from every contributor.
Best wishes,
Thomas
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