Dear R-devel,
REvolution appear to be offering ParallelR only when bundled with their R
Enterprise edition. As such it appears to be non-free and closed source.
http://www.revolution-computing.com/products/parallel-r.php
Since R is GPL and not LGPL, is this a breach of the GPL ?
Below is the "GPL and ParallelR" thread from their R forum.
mdowle > It appears that ParallelR (packages foreach and iterators) is only
available bundled with the Enterprise edition. Since R is GPL, and ParallelR is
derived from R, should ParallelR not also be GPL? Regards, Matthew
revolution > Hello Matthew, ParallelR consists of both proprietary and GPL
packages. The randomForest and snow libraries GPL licensed, whereas the other
libraries we include have a commercial license(including 'foreach' and
'iterators'). Stephen Weller
revolution > I wanted to expand on Stephen's reply. ParallelR is a suite of R
packages, and it is well established that packages can be under a difference
license than R itself (i.e. not the GPL). For example, package MCE is licensed
under BSD, RColorBrewer is licensed under Apache, most of Bioconductor is under
the Artistic license and some are under completely unique licenses (e.g.
mclust). REvolution Computing developed all of the code in ParallelR (except
for the bundled GPL packages Stephen mentions), and we decided to release it
under our own license in REvolution R Enterprise.
That said, we do already release components of parallelR, such as the
underlying engine, Networkspaces (also written by REvolution Computing) under
an open source licence. Also, we are likely to release some other components
including foreach and iterators, to CRAN soon.
David Smith
Director of Community, REvolution Computing
mdowle > The examples you give (MCE, RColorBrewer, Bioconductor) are all
available for free including the source code. Their licenses have been approved
by the FSF. Free software and open source are the terms of work derived from
GPL licensed software. REvolution's packages 'foreach' and 'iterators' are
neither free or open source. Can you provide a precedent for proprietary
closed-source packages for R ? Is your policy approved by the FSF ?
I don't object to REvolution. I am a fan of you making money from training
courses, consultancy, support and binaries. These are all permitted by the GPL.
However the GPL does not allow you to distribute work derived from R which is
either closed source or non-free.
R is GPL, not LGPL.
The above is my personal understanding. I am now posting to r-devel to check,
feel free to join the public debate there.
Regards, Matthew
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