commercial software selling a R module - question about GPL license rights

I understand that it is difficult to make the distinction between
"linking" and "derived work". Whatever the conclusion, I always feel a
little bit abused when someone wants to "sell" me R somehow (here, you
have to pay 3500$/year to use R inside of Pipeline Pilot). I would
accept to pay this money if I was in front of R experts that sell me
their expertise, indeed. But this is not the case: they don't know  
much
about R, and they made a really ugly and inefficient interface between
PP and R that is not worth those 3500$/year.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

Peter Dalgaard wrote:

Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> writes:

Hello all,

Sorry for this email not directly related to R developement. I  
just come
from a nice demonstration session from Scitegic about their Pipeline
Pilot (PP) software, and especially their 'R collection' which  
brings R
calculations into the software
(http://www.scitegic.com/documents/RStats_Collection.pdf).

I looked carefully on the way they do it: they pass data from PP  
to R
using text files, they call R.exe using a R script and input -  
output
files, like:

R.exe --nosave --no-environ --no-resore-data < script.R > output.txt

And in the script, you have:

read.table(...)

which imports the data just exported from PP in an CVS file by the
component. I don't want to discuss here the ugly and extremely
inefficient solution they use to call R on their data, but anyway...

So far, so good, they respect the GPL license since R is not  
embedded
into PP, and you have to download and install it separately.

But they also provide a series of "R component" ready to use like 'R
ANOVA', 'R PCA', R Neural Net', etc... which are basically R scripts
with replaceable variables (replacement is done by PP before  
feeding the
script to the R engine). For instance, you will have:

parameter <- $(PPvariable)

in the R script. In the PP component, you have an option to  
specify the
value of 'PPvariable', let's say: PPvariable = 10, and the  
replacement
done in the R script is:

parameter <- 10

before to feed this script to R. So, everything appears  
transparent to
the end-user who parameterizes the scripts from within the PP  
GUI. That
is what they call "each component generates an R script on-the- 
fly"...
(sic!)

However, I was suprised to learn that the Pipeline Pilot R  
Collection is
not GPL and is not free (in term of money, i.e., you have to pay
3500$/year to use it). I am not sure, but I think they break the GPL
license here since they use a commercial license for, basically, a
collection of R scripts embedded in their 'PP components'.

Anyone with better expertise than me could look at this, please?

Offhand, I don't think this is a problem.

We've discussed a few similar cases. Things are sometimes slightly
murky due to the FSF's unclear (or undecided) definition of the
relation between "linking" and "derived work". However, it was never
the intention that GPL code could not be _used_ by non-free software.
That point might get clearer if you substitute mySql or a similar
database instead of R.

There are some limitations though. In particular if the connection is
so tight that R has become an integrated part of the application,  
then
the rules for derived works may apply.