Hacker News Reader

Comment by statics2245 | Hacker News Reader

For all the naysayers... Try installing python/jupyter in a corporate environment. It was a no go from the start at the last 4 companies I have worked at.

R and RStudio just installed and worked for 3 of the 4 companies. The 4th required a tweak to one environmental variable and everything installed/worked after that.

Corporate IT restrictions can make or break software.

View on HN

The flip side is that RStudio is AGPL [1] – although not too surprisingly this is not heavily advertised. It may be easy to setup, but your legal department will have a heart attack if they find out that you're using it. At some point, RStudio will ask you to comply with the AGPL or pay them for a non-AGPL license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

We're proud to be AGPL. The AGPL license is pretty clearly stated on both the product page and the download page. We were an AGPL licensed project years before we were a "real" company, because we thought that for server-oriented software (RStudio was originally conceived to be server only), it was the license most aligned with the principles of the R project.

It's certainly not our intention to deceive and then submarine our customers, and I sincerely hope that's not what you were implying. IANAL but RStudio users have nothing to fear from the AGPL, as the copyleft provisions are for derivative works of RStudio itself.

If OTOH someone is trying to build an R editor interface for their commercial SaaS data science startup, and want to leverage our code to do it, then yeah--the AGPL is going to apply and if that's a problem then we try to work something out.

(BTW I'm a fan of the work you're doing with Julia!)

That's a fair reason for the AGPL license choice for RStudio. It is a product-like software project after all. My experience with corporate legal is that they are much more wary of GPL software than strictly necessary – hence the warning about AGPL since ease of use != ease of permission. (We've had JuliaBox fire-walled from a few big banks, albeit not for license reasons, but because they don't want private data on the cloud, so it's a familiar issue.) I had a hard time finding any mention of the AGPL on the RStudio site, including some broken links.

Congrats on the release! RStudio pushes the envelope on very many data analytics UI features. Excellent work.

Just for the record, if you follow the Download RStudio link on the RStudio homepage, or go to Products -> RStudio, you will see the license clearly mentioned before you try to download RStudio. AGPL is also displayed in our Github repository if anybody cares about looking at the source repository: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio So I don't know why it was so hard for you to find the mention of AGPL...

It passed our legal department's review and now an official software offering for our actuaries. We use the software to analyze data not distribute software derived from RStudio.

While I am a big fan of Julia, in my opinion it has a long way to go to be ready for our version of prime time.

Python on the other hand just doesn't have the breath of statistical models that R has. Generalized Additive Models is just one example.

" At some point, RStudio will ask you to comply with the AGPL or pay them for a non-AGPL license."

Did you mean to use "may" instead of "will"? The latter would seem to indicate that the R-Studio makers actually plan to do this.

I'm not sure I follow why AGPL for the IDE you're using is a big problem? Surely the IDE license does not affect the license of code written in the IDE?

> Surely the IDE license does not affect the license of code written in the IDE?

Agreed. However, the R programming language and many of its libraries are GPL licensed.

Can someone elaborate how R can be legally used in to develop proprietary or commercial software? RStudio's website [1] lists all of this large companies that apparently use R.

[1]: https://www.rstudio.com/

It's no problem to use GPL software to develop commercial software. If it were the vast majority of software would be open source as some of the most popular compiler toolchains are primarily or wholly open source.

What you cannot do, however, is modify GPL software, as you're then creating a derivative work which must legally also bear the GPL license.

Yes, that is correct. My question was about using the R programming language and its libraries rather than RStudio.

If you create a program that uses any of the GPL licensed R libraries, that program must also be GPL licensed [1].

Additionally, the GPL license prohibits using GPL licensed software in proprietary systems [2].

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySy...

Have you tried the Anaconda distribution? You should be able to install it entirely in user space.

I can confirm that that is possible. I have it running on my locked-down employer-issued windows machine.

I have had the flipped experience. Getting Anaconda and notebooks for Python amd R were trivial on AWS but impossible for base r, rcpp, and Rstudio for the latest version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com