You can combine GPL and proprietary software as long as you don't redistribute the combination. If a single derived work combining GPL and proprietary code is distributed, that voids the GPL license, leaving the distributor and recipient of the derived work without a valid license for the GPL code, leaving them open to legal action by the copyright holders of the GPL code.
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Simon Kornblith <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, January 2, 2015 2:59:04 PM UTC-5, Douglas Bates wrote: >> >> For many statistics-oriented Julia users there is a great advantage in >> being able to piggy-back on R development and to use at least the data sets >> from R packages. Hence the RDatasets package and the read_rda function in >> the DataFrames package for reading saved R data. >> >> Over the last couple of days I have been experimenting with running an >> embedded R within Julia and calling R functions from Julia. This is similar >> in scope to the Rif package except that this code is written in Julia and >> not as a set of wrapper functions written in C. The R API is a C API and, >> in some ways, very simple. Everything in R is represented as a "symbolic >> expression" or SEXPREC and passed around as pointers to such expressions >> (called an SEXP type). Most functions take one or more SEXP values as >> arguments and return an SEXP. >> >> I have avoided reading the code for Rif for two reasons: >> 1. It is GPL3 licensed >> 2. I already know a fair bit of the R API and where to find API function >> signatures. >> > > AFAICT, Rif.jl is GPLv2+. I'm not sure how much a less restrictive license > helps here. My understanding is that, because R is GPLv2+, code that links > against it must be redistributed under GPLv2+ or a less restrictive > license, i.e., while it would be legal to redistribute code that uses > either Rif.jl or RCall.jl under GPLv2+ or MIT, neither could be used in > closed source software. > > Simon >
