R devel - Feb 2001 - Change of licence for header files and import libraries

The copyrights on the distributed header files and export files R.exp
have been changed to the more permissive LGPL.

It came to our attention that some projects are interpreting GPL to
mean that compiling against the header files or linking against a
Windows import library brings the compiled code under the scope of
GPL.  This would mean it would be impossible to distribute binary
versions of non-GPL packages with compiled code which called entry
points in the R executable or DLL, of which there are many on CRAN.

We encourage packages to be distributed under Open Source conditions,
but accept that this is not possible for some contributions.  Our
intention is that export files and import libraries be `accessors'
under clause 5 of the LGPL, so that in most cases no (additional)
restrictions are imposed by compiling a package using the LGPL-ed
components of R.

To avoid any anomalies, the versions of the same files in R versions
1.0.0 to 1.2.1 may also be used under LGPL or GPL.

For the R core team,

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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