[R] R License

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Juan Ulises Bohorquez Carvajal
<Juan.Bohorquez at ecopetrol.com.co> wrote:
> Thanks, could you send to me an official certificate in pdf with this information? Or a certified email to support the information license?

And what would be the authority that supplies such a certificate? R is
not the proprietary property of a company or person, so I don't think
a body exists that could supply such an authoritative email.

What does (or should) exist are the comments in the source files
explaining the license terms, and this is echoed in the banner message
on startup.

I'm sure if you asked very nicely you could get a letter from someone
held in high esteem by the R community - some professor at an ancient
university perhaps - stating their belief that you can use R for your
company in accordance with the licenses. But that would just be
repeating what you've already heard here. The licensing is with the
code, and clearly stated.

Other, larger companies use R extensively - see this recent blog entry:

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/05/companies-using-r-in-2014.html

Note in particular the banner when R starts: "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY"
- which means if a bug in R makes one of your gas processing plants
explode, there's probably nobody to sue - but if you read the small
print on proprietary software licenses you'll probably find similar
terms anyway. R puts it out there in block capitals every time.

Barry

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