On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Some legal advice is probably needed, but do also see this statement from the R Foundation about package licenses: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-May/053248.html In general, the R community has taken the opinion that it is ok to license code that links to R with non-GPL (but GPL-compatible) licenses. You can distribute the package code according to its license, but whenever you bundle it with R (i.e. to actually use it) the GPL will apply to the whole conglomerate. So including an R arrow package would be fine according to the general standards of the R community. The Apache legal counsel may of course disagree. Hadley -- http://hadley.nz
