Selling R-Script

Is it OK to sell a R-Script I built for someone or a company without a license?

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and you should only take a lawyer's advice to court.

That said, this is a common question and the answer is often:

Don't worry, you're not going to violate R's license.

As long as what you're selling doesn't include source code that's covered under another license, or any binaries made from that source code, you're in the clear for copyright. Unless you copy-pasted and modified somebody else's code, you hold the copyright for whatever you've written. If your customers need R or some other packages to run your code, you can give them your code and tell them where to download everything else.

So that covers open source licenses, like what R uses. If you use any packages besides what comes with the basic R installation, make sure the licenses for those packages don't have any weird rules. It's unlikely, because CRAN rarely accepts packages without open-source licenses, but it's still good to check.

If you want to know more about open source licensing, check out the Open Source Initiative.


Above, I assumed what you meant "without a license" to be

without using the same license as R

If you meant

without applying any license to my code

then your customers wouldn't be able to use your script. Without a license, they don't have the right to run it, copy it, modify it, or even use it as inspiration. You need to include a license when selling code or software. Ask a lawyer to help write a license.

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