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Regarding licensing Terms

5 messages · Narendra, Marc Schwartz, Spencer Graves +1 more

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On Oct 3, 2012, at 4:49 AM, Narendra <pratap.narendra at gmail.com> wrote:

            
In the case of a third party CRAN package, you are better off contacting the package maintainers directly.

With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, ggmap appears to be distributed under the MIT license, which is more liberal than say the GPL. There is some information here regarding the MIT license:

  http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

which may be helpful.

Depending upon what you may be planning to do with your applications (eg. integrate ggmap and sell your software) you should definitely contact a lawyer with specific expertise in open source software licenses before proceeding. If you simply plan to use ggmap and your software, without subsequent distribution, then even the GPL would allow you to do that without restrictions. 

Most critical issues vis-a-vis open source licenses come into play when you cross the line from simply being a user/developer to copying and distributing. In the latter case, whether you plan to charge for the resultant product or make it available for free, is irrelevant.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz
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On 10/3/2012 7:26 AM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
free distribution vs. charging for the product is irrelevant?


       Some licenses explicitly allow free distribution but not 
commercial. ... ???


       Spencer
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On Oct 3, 2012, at 9:56 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com> wrote:

            
To the best of my knowledge Spencer, none of the OSI/FSF certified "open source" licenses allow for the restriction of use to non-commercial or non-profit applications. For example, see points 1, 5 and 6 on:

  http://opensource.org/docs/osd

Marc
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I think the main concern with using ggmap is probably the licenses
associated with your use of google map tiles.  (Using OSM tiles would
probably alleviate many of those issues)

Hadley