11–20 of 78 posts
It almost sounds like they want to switch to Haskell.
Or perhaps incanter with all it's lispy goodness. "Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics." http://incanter.org/
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Compstat-2...
> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with). Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some…
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/gpl-sources.php
And from their FAQ:
Yes. CRAN R is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2). As permitted under that license, Revolution R is based on a modified version of CRAN R. The source code to that modified version (including a list of changes) is available for download when you download the binary version of Revolution R, as required by the GPL. As an open-source company, Revolution Analytics respects the Free and Open Source Software philosophy and respects all free-software licenses. Revolution Analytics is also a direct supporter of the open-source R project: financially (as a benefactor of the R Foundation), organizationally (by sponsoring events and user group meetings), and technically (by contributing or modifications to CRAN R back to the community).
To be honest I've been using R a bit lately for my work and while I like it I don't find it at all innovative. That's not a criticism of R: the libraries it has are amazing, as well as the mindshare among people who care of statistics. But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. So I am kind of pleased my th…
But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. Indeed - it would be a shame for them to start over from scratch and end up coming up with a brand new language, brand new syntax, brand new quirks, brand new performance problems, etc., while they could have simply searched around a bit for something that's alread…
> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with). Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some…
RA claims to have adopted this "arm's length" approach, releasing their direct extensions to the community. They ask me for identifying information to let me download the software; don't know if that's against the rules. Critically, their enterprise product is pitched as a collection of separate tools: IDE, debugger, analysis tool, etc.
There are a few other ways that people have made GPL'd code proprietary: (1) providing a hosted service instead of distributing software, or (2) distributing only a hardware appliance that contains inextricable software. The latter is controversial with respect to GPL2; GPL3 more clearly prohibits it.
> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with). Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some…
It appears they release the sources for the GPL parts and their changes to the GPL parts: http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/gpl-sources.php And from their FAQ: Yes. CRAN R is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 2). As permitted under that license, Revolution R is based on a modified version of CRAN R. The source code to that modified version (including a list of changes) is available for…
> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with). Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some…
I would welcome a replacement for R just because the new language's name might be easier to google. I hope they don't call it Q.
To be honest I've been using R a bit lately for my work and while I like it I don't find it at all innovative. That's not a criticism of R: the libraries it has are amazing, as well as the mindshare among people who care of statistics. But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. So I am kind of pleased my th…
But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. Indeed - it would be a shame for them to start over from scratch and end up coming up with a brand new language, brand new syntax, brand new quirks, brand new performance problems, etc., while they could have simply searched around a bit for something that's alread…
To be honest I've been using R a bit lately for my work and while I like it I don't find it at all innovative. That's not a criticism of R: the libraries it has are amazing, as well as the mindshare among people who care of statistics. But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. So I am kind of pleased my th…
I agree if we're talking about defining a new R (like the blog post discusses), but the existing R makes sense to me to exist as its own language. It wasn't really invented from scratch gratuitously, but began as an open-source reimplementation of the Bell Labs "S" language, which had already become close to a de-facto standard in the statistics community. After 30 years of writing S and R code, I think there's going to be a big uphill effort if you want to convince statisticians to read and write Ruby code instead. You'd also lose the ability to run snippets of code from the thousands of existing papers that include R/S code in an appendix.
One in-between possibility could be to retain the standard syntax/semantics but target an existing VM with a bigger development community. Ihaka seems to think that's impossible (he briefly discusses attempts to compile R as futile), but lots of weird and highly dynamic languages now have more efficient implementations than most people would've thought possible 10 years ago.
> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with). Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some…
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.