"possible licenses for RM-plugins?"

holger

Hi,

we've created a R-plugin for RM. It implements generic operators for data-transformation and plotting, and a Open-in-R operator for rapid R-prototyping. It nicely integrats into the result-view model of RM, and is better compared to the R integration in Knime as it dynamically adapts figures to their panel-sizes. We would like to make this plugin available to the RM-community asap.

We're currently trying to figure out an appropriate os-license model for it. What plugin-licenses are compatible with the RM-license model? Could we use BSD (or something similarly business friendly) or do we need to use GPL? Or would we need to use gnu-affero as RM does?  What are the diffs between gpl and gnu-affero? Even if we don't want to do it: Would it be possible to sell closed-sourced plugins for RM?

BTW, we created a very similar plugin for for Matlab too, and this is also likely to be open-sourced in the same manner.

Best, Holger

RalfKlinkenberg

Hi Holger,

thanks for your intention to make your R-plugin for RapidMiner available to the RapidMiner community. Regarding the open source license for your plugin, I would recommend to use AGPL (Affero GNU General Public License) version 3. If you include R in your plugin, your license should be compatible with the R license. R is licensed under GPL version 2: http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/
Hence GPL version 2, GPL version 3, and AGPL version 3 are compatible with the R license.  RapidMiner is licensed under AGPL version 3.  Hence I recommend to use AGPL version 3 for your plugin as well.

A closed source license for a plugin including one open source tool (R) into another open source tool (RapidMiner) would not make much sense from my point of view and it is probably problematic from a legal point of view.

Since a high-quality R-plugin (extension) for RapidMiner would be of interest for many RapidMiner users, we could offer to distribute your plugin through the RapidMiner update server, which also distributes all of our RapidMiner extensions for  text mining, value series processing, reporting,  parallelization, and for the integration of Weka.  All our RapidMiner extensions are like RapidMiner itself licensed under AGPL 3.

Feel free to contact us directly to discuss license aspects and how we can help you distribute your plugin to the community:
Contact Rapid-I

Best regards,
Ralf