Kathy The dedication of the developers and several other important things have already been mentioned. Here are a few points I have not seen.
- I believe S was originally open source (before the term existed and before GPL, and license issues were probably clouded with respect to changing the code). This meant parts of the community of S user had this tradition. Some, no doubt, were a bit upset about the Splus move to closed source. - This community had also significantly contributed to Statlib, so there were some "packages" that could be leveraged in the beginning. This may have been not so important for what the packages did, but for the fact that they gave an extensive test suite, so one could have considerable confidence in the results. - Purchase cost is typically not so important for corporate and institutional users, since it is usually dominated by support costs. However, young users may often feel they would prefer to have their personal investment in something they can easily take with them if they move. Some of us at the other end like the idea that we don't need a corporate account to continue research we might be interested in doing when we retire. - All risk averse users should like the idea that programs and acquired skills are not tied to the operating system and hardware flavor of the month. (R has excelled in this respect.) - Help on the R lists has always been exceptionally good (sometimes even if you don't read the documentation first - but expect to be chastised). If you look at the S help list over the past 15 years, you will find many of the most difficult questions were answered by people involved with R. - I ran my own code interchangeably in Splus and R for many years (starting with R-0.16). For a long time Splus was "production" and R was so I would have a backup. For me, the defining factor in moving to R for "production" was the introduction of the "package" system. This is really special in the way that it develops the synergy of the community. By packaging your code you get to leverage all the code checking and documentation checking of the system, and you get to add your own tests that run automatically when you build your package. Not only that, but if you make your package availabe on CRAN you get not only the useful feedback from users, but also the automatic information about what is going to break in your code in the next release of R (from the daily checks on multiple platforms). This is not only useful to package developers, but provides R itself with what I would guess is the largest automatic test bed in the industry. The system is also interesting in the way that it has resolved one of the big problems of Statlib: there is an automatic mechanism for removing broken and unmaintained packages. Paul Gilbert Kathy Gerber wrote: > Earlier today I sent a question to Frank Harrell as an R developer with > whom I am most familiar. He suggested also that I put my questions to > the list for additional responses. Next month I'll be giving a talk on > R as an example of high quality open source software. I think there is > much to learn from R as a high quality extensible product that (at least > as far as I can tell) has never been "spun" or "hyped" like so many open > source fads. > > The question that intrigues me the most is why is R as an open source > project is so incredibly successful and other projects, say for example, > Octave don't enjoy that level of success? > > I have some ideas of course, but I would really like to know your > thoughts when you look at R from such a vantage point. > > Thanks. > Kathy Gerber > University of Virginia > ITC - Research Computing Support > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ==================================================================================== La version française suit le texte anglais. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This email may contain privileged and/or confidential information, and the Bank of Canada does not waive any related rights. 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