[bipin-nag]

I checked their site. Revolution R has 4 products: Open, Plus, Enterprise, Cloud

1. Open: "This one’s not a difference at all: Revolution R Open 8.0 beta is based on R 3.1.1. No modifications are made to core R".

Simply put it is a repack, comes with extra packages like Reproducible R Toolkit, and has a mirror for CRAN.

2. Their Revolution R Plus is what is RHEL to linux. They provide technical support on top of the Open distribution.

3. This is where it smells fishy. "Revolution R Enterprise Workstation is licensed for a single named user, and available in two editions:". But is it a modified R version. They mention no change to core for open, but not for this. If they use R which is licensed under GPL how can they sell it ? Else if it is proprietary why call it "R"?

4. They provide assistance in running Revolution R Enterprise on a Server.

[rjcz]

> 3. This is where it smells fishy. "Revolution R Enterprise Workstation is licensed for a single named user, and available in two editions:". But is it a modified R version. They mention no change to core for open, but not for this. If they use R which is licensed under GPL how can they sell it ? Else if it is proprietary why call it "R"?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

No wonder F(L)OSS has such a bad PR in some business circles.

How are they, or regular folk for that matter, to ever understanding it, if even some of us don't!?

[Bootvis]

I believe chollida comment, placed 10 hours before yours answers the question how they can sell it:

It's linked with the Intels commercial BLAS, see here:

http://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/documents/rro/open/#inte...

[bipin-nag]

2 issues here:

1. You can't package GPL stuff into another and then sell the new product.

2. If it is required for Intel's commercial BLAS and they are giving it away for free, it would be a great loss to Intel. So whatever they are giving away must be available for free. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Edit: Open version makes use of non-commercial license MKL, which you can get anyway, see https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/NComForm.aspx.... And most likely they are using commercial version for enterprise. But again can you compile R like that and charge for it.