Martyn and Duncan are both correct. I am on the Microsoft team that creates and distributes Microsoft R Open (MRO). We make absolutely no changes to R at all, just some enchancements in the distribution. As already pointed out: * We add the Intel MKL to replace the built-in BLAS. This is similar to replacing the BLAS with OpenBLAS or Atlas - readily available for Linux distributions of R * We make some changes in the RProfile.site file, notably pointing to an MRAN snapshot, in turn a timestamped mirror of CRAN * We add some package, e.g. foreach and iterators - all of these packages are on CRAN.
In Microsoft R Client and Microsoft R Server we go further: * We add proprietary packages that add scalability and connectivity to SQL Server, Hadoop and other big data platforms * But, again, the underlying R code remains unchanged. In addition, Microsoft provides bug fixes and other enhancements to R itself. Microsoft remains committed to supporting both the R Foundation and the R Consortium. I hope this helps. Andrie (Andrie de Vries, Senior Programme Manager, Microsoft) (You can also contact me at mailto:adevr...@microsoft.com) -----Original Message----- From: R-devel [mailto:r-devel-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Martyn Plummer Sent: 10 June 2017 16:06 To: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>; Morgan <2005.mor...@gmail.com>; r-devel@r-project.org Subject: Re: [Rd] Question about R developpment I would describe MRO as a distribution of R, in the same way that Fedora, Debian, SUSE etc are distributions of Linux. It is not fundamentally different from the version of R that you can download from CRAN but the binary builds offer some specific features: 1) The binary build is linked to the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) which may increase the speed of some matrix operations 2) Packages are downloaded from MRAN, Microsoft's time-stamped copy of CRAN. This can help with reproducibility of analyses that rely on CRAN packages. As far as I know, all of the additional packages that are bundled with MRO are freely distributable and also available from CRAN. As Roy points out, both Microsoft and the R Foundation are partners in the R Consortium. So we do talk to each other as well as other stakeholders who participate in the Consortium. Martyn ________________________________________ From: R-devel <r-devel-boun...@r-project.org> on behalf of Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> Sent: 11 June 2017 00:09 To: Morgan; r-devel@r-project.org Subject: Re: [Rd] Question about R developpment On 10/06/2017 2:38 PM, Morgan wrote: > Hi, > > I had a question that might not seem obvious to me. > > I was wondering why there was no patnership between microsoft the R > core team and eventually other developpers to improve R in one unified > version instead of having different teams developping their own version of R. As far as I know, there's only one version of R currently being developed. Microsoft doesn't offer anything different; they just offer a build of a slightly older version of base R, and a few packages that are not in the base version. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message and its attachments are strictly confidenti...{{dropped:8}} ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
