Re:Announcing RStudio v1.0
by StefanKarpinski on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @05:34AM
(#12853231)
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'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!)