From simon.urbanek at r-project.org  Thu Aug 25 17:24:24 2011
From: simon.urbanek at r-project.org (Simon Urbanek)
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:24:24 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Licensing Issue with JRI
In-Reply-To: <CAOCX9Dm4fD6P200cgXhX0icHZw1Y2D+n2zgNQ797Di2dng=H_A@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAOCX9Dm4fD6P200cgXhX0icHZw1Y2D+n2zgNQ797Di2dng=H_A@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <D861327C-4091-4073-95F2-1FD8AF61AA21@r-project.org>


On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:26 PM, Lokkju Brennr wrote:

> Hoping someone can clear up a licencing question...
> 
> My understanding is that R is licensed under the GPL, with some
> headers licensed under the LGPL (per COPYRIGHTS, so that R plugins
> don't have to be GPL - arguably incorrect, but besides the point).
> JRI states that it is licensed under the LGPL - but it links against R
> shared libraries (or so is my understanding - please correct me if I'm
> wrong).
> This seems incompatible, as per
> (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense) if there
> is any GPL code in a compiled assembly, the resulting binary must be
> GPL, and per (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL)
> if a library is GPL, then anything that links against it must be GPL.
> 

IANAL, so please consult a lawyer, this doesn't constitute a legal advice, but there is nothing saying that JRI cannot be LGPL since it is not derived from GPL code. It uses a defined API (that is even released as LGPL but that's probably beside the point as you said). Obviously, if you use it with R then the whole will be covered by GPL and LGPL is GPL-compatible [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses ]. FWIW note that rJava - which is the distribution of JRI - is licensed as GPL.

Cheers,
Simon



[Rd] Licensing Issue with JRI
Simon Urbanek