It's interesting that he saw that has a violation of the commons. I don't know the details, but it seems like a feature rather than a bug that businesses can be built around open-sourced code.
R has been really surprisingly shoddy about it's license enforcement on dynamicly-loadable extensions (esp. for an official GNU project). Crucially, they declared an extremely useful subset of their API as usable for non-GPL works (similar to how the two flavors of drivers in the linux kernel work) and people now drive trucks through it all the time. Early on this benefited R, though.
