Re: does r-cran-afex violate the GPL?

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sat, Oct 03, 2015 at 09:23:40AM +0200, Jonathon Love wrote:
> On 3/10/2015 12:04 am, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > I don't think so. A system call to the kernel, for example, is
> > considered to be "using" the kernel, and will not make your program to
> > be GPL-2. Is this really different from that?
> 
> but the kernel a special case, because it falls under the system library
> exception (?)
> 
> [...]

No, when I said "using the kernel" I was referring to this:

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING

  NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
  services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
  of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

This is not an "exception", it's just a clarification.

The way I see it, your package just uses other R packages, but it's
not a derived work of them.