Contents
Can a company run a modified version of the GPL?
A company is running a modified version of a GPL’ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources? Is use within one organization or company “distribution”?
What does GPL stand for in the GNU license?
“GPL” stands for “General Public License”. The most widespread such license is the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short. This can be further shortened to “GPL”, when it is understood that the GNU GPL is the one intended.
Who is responsible for enforcing the GPL license?
Since the GPL is a copyright license, the copyright holders of the software are the ones who have the power to enforce the GPL. If you see a violation of the GPL, you should inform the developers of the GPL-covered software involved. They either are the copyright holders, or are connected with the copyright holders.
Who are the third parties to the GPL?
The GPL says that modified versions, if released, must be “licensed … to all third parties.” Who are these third parties? Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
A company is running a modified version of a program licensed under the GNU Affero GPL (AGPL) on a web site. Does the AGPL say they must release their modified sources? Is use within one organization or company “distribution”?
Do you need a license to write your code?
Note that simply using a package or R itself doesn’t require that you comply with the license; this is why you can write proprietary R code and why R packages can have any license you choose. For more details about licensing R packages, I recommend Licensing R by Colin Fay.
Where do I find the license in R?
Every license sets the License field in the DESCRIPTION . This contains the name of the license in a standard form so that R CMD check and CRAN can automatically verify it. It comes in four main forms: A name and version specification, e.g. GPL (>= 2), or Apache License (= 2.0).