Thanks for weighing in on this, Hadley. To your point
> 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. If someone wanted to create an all-GPLv2 software distribution containing R and a bunch of libraries, then including the R Arrow library would be problematic as Apache 2.0 is not compatible (https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html). I don't think this is really a problem since R users generally just install things from CRAN. My understanding is that ASF legal has taken issue when an Apache project _cannot be used at all_ without a hard GPL dependency (outside certain exceptions, e.g. generated build files by GPL tools). This makes it impossible to create a self-contained software distribution of the project whose code and all dependencies are Apache 2.0 compatible. There was the recent BSD+Patents discussion on LEGAL where projects were disallowed from using projects under that license as a hard dependency. I will open a LEGAL issue on the JIRA to discuss, but since the R portion of Arrow is an _optional_ part of the project, I am hopeful this will be deemed OK. - Wes On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 5:39 PM, Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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
