I can open a ticket to get a definitive answer to these questions. >From http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#platform and the subsequent questions there, I view the R language and build tools like Rcpp as part of the "R platform", which is, for the most part, all GPL. SparkR depends on R, but only has testthat (MIT) as a dependency beyond the R runtime. I think it is challenging to build high quality software for the R platform relying only on the main R runtime and the limited third party components which happens to be released under non-CategoryX licenses.
On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 4:02 AM, Uwe L. Korn <uw...@xhochy.com> wrote: > For the license issues, I would either refer to Spark how they took care > of these licensing things in SparkR or file a ticket in the LEGAL > tracker in JIRA to get help on these licensing issues from the ASF. > Having GPL runtime dependency looks very problematic for me in an Apache > project. > > Uwe > > > On Thu, Aug 3, 2017, at 12:19 AM, Wes McKinney wrote: >> As some context: the R language runtime and a significant portion of >> R's third party libraries are released under GPLv2 and/or GPLv3. >> >> Rcpp, a toolkit for developing C++ extensions for R, is dual-licensed >> under GPLv2/GPLv3. It is a build and runtime dependency of many >> packages (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rcpp/index.html). It >> does not need to be vendored with a project or redistributed in any >> form with Apache Arrow. >> >> Since R bindings would be an optional component of Arrow, this seems >> less concerning from a licensing point of view, but I am not an expert >> on the policies for project component dependencies. >> >> Thanks >> Wes >> >> On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 6:11 PM, Clark Fitzgerald <clarkfi...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > Rcpp provides a friendlier interface between R and C++, similar to Cython >> > for Python. >> > >> > Do people have opinions on whether R / Arrow depends on Rcpp? Alternatively >> > the bindings can be written directly using R's C++ API. >> > >> > Here's a JIRA for work on R / Arrow: >> > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-1325
