non-infectious license for R package?

See inline...

On Mar 24, 2017, at 8:52 AM, Mario Emmenlauer <mario at 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.

Hi,

With the usual IANAL caveat and that I am not speaking on behalf of any
other parties:

The questions you are posing will require legal advice, so your desire
above to not get legal advice is in direct conflict with what you actually
need here.

To your comments below, you cannot change existing licenses on software, R
or otherwise. That is only something that the copyright holder(s) can do
and you are not one of them.

The GPL has a FAQ here:

  https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html <
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html>

that you may find enlightening.

A very general statement, which is that if your compiled code (in whatever
language) does not "link" against R's libraries and does not directly
contain GPL licensed code (e.g. copying and pasting R Foundation
copyrighted source code into yours), that is one way to steer clear of the
viral part of the GPL license vis-a-vis R, if you want to, but not the only
way and not a guarantee either. There can be nuances, some of which are
covered in the FAQ above.

On the other hand, if your compiled code is linking to R's libraries,
which you seem to suggest may be the case below, then your code, at least
the relevant parts of it, will need to be licensed under a GPL compatible
license.

This again is part of the nuance, in terms of the scope of the impact on
your code (all or parts) and where legal advice is needed, to steer clear
of downstream potential issues that could result in legal and financial
liabilities for you.

The issue of linking to third party proprietary libraries is something
that you will have to evaluate with respect to their licenses and any
limitations that they may impose on your code and it's licensing.

Since you seem to also be suggesting that you may use closed source
components in your package, you should be aware, that vis-a-vis CRAN, you
would not be able to submit your package for distribution via that channel,
since CRAN submissions may not contain pre-compiled binaries or similar and
the entire package must conform to a compatible open source license. Thus,
if you go down that path, you would have to find other distribution
channels for your package, such as a company web site, etc.

None of the above should be construed as legal advice and if you plan to
go down the path of offering a commercial service that you would charge
clients for, a lawyer is mandatory to provide legal guidance and to assess
your business risks. Even if your actual R related package is offered free
of charge, while generating revenue through other means, if you should run
afoul of software licensing requirements, that can still leave you open to
financial liabilities and put your business and even personal assets at
risk.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz

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

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