Respectfully, I’d say that tone is unwarranted.
Anyway, what I meant is that it is illegal to transcribe a GPL R package to Julia and release it under the MIT license. Of course there are R packages that aren’t GPL but the number is small enough to almost not matter (and both betareg and nortest are GPL). There is a strong push towards MIT in the julia community, and people tend to react less positively to GPL packages - there are ~80 packages in Metadata that are not MIT, compared to ~1350 packages that are.
Of course you are technically correct - you don’t break GPL by porting a language and releasing the port GPL. That’s they key point of that license.