From h.wickham at gmail.com  Thu Nov  6 15:49:05 2014
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (Hadley Wickham)
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 08:49:05 -0600
Subject: [Rd] Citation if copying R base code
In-Reply-To: <CAFDcVCQL3Y0c7h47C4fwthgOw+xM4kYSB1+9=F-D4pT96ds=Qg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <545B5430.2030403@gmail.com> <545B5D4A.1060105@gmail.com>
	<CAFDcVCQL3Y0c7h47C4fwthgOw+xM4kYSB1+9=F-D4pT96ds=Qg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CABdHhvGOp2wkcQ7yLhoAS27YstU0mEURybN2cdi+L6X60tjwFQ@mail.gmail.com>

> Theoretically you could ask the copyright holder of that piece of code
> whether he/she/it allows you to use a different license. This brings up
> another question: who is formally the copyright holder of the R source code
> (and documentation)? The R Foundation, the individual who contributed the
> code in the first place, or someone else? You could certainly imagine a
> case where a piece of code was donated to R by someone, e.g. the code
> originates from a user-contributed package and has not been modified since.
> It may even be that that code was licensed under another license at the
> time.

Unless a contributor signs a contributor license agreement, the
copyright belongs to the original author.  I don't think that the
R-foundation is in the practice of requiring these, so the the
copyright of R itself will be a mismash of many different people. This
is can be seen as a good thing because it makes it impossible to
re-license code away from the GPL.

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] Citation if copying R base code
Hadley Wickham