[R] Revolution R and the R Community?

[ivo welch]

As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R. Is the relationship
between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one? Do
the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter? Is
there a competitive aspect? is their forum competitive with r-help?
any other thoughts? (most of all, I simply hope that they help some
of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have volunteered their
expertise to help me so many times.)

as for me, I discovered Revolution a few days ago. they did not have
an OSX enterprise version, so I downloaded the community version.
alas, after installation, starting up their GUI interface, I
immediately get
Error in library(Revobase) : there is no package called 'Revobase'
I tried to sign up for their forum, but the forum email responder
seems to be dead. (I sent them an email, but have not heard back
yet.) someone else here tried out their enterprise version on a linux
machine, but it had ugly problems in the creation of the top-level
Makefile. so, my initial impression is not overwhelming. are they
for real?

regards,

/iaw

----
Ivo Welch (ivo....@brown.edu, ivo....@gmail.com)

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[David Smith]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:08 AM, ivo welch <ivo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R.  Is the relationship
> between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one?  Do
> the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter?  Is
> there a competitive aspect?  is their forum competitive with r-help?
> any other thoughts?  (most of all, I simply hope that they help some
> of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have volunteered their
> expertise to help me so many times.)

I'm from Revolution (as of last week, newly rechristened Revolution
Analytics) -- I've been with them for almost two years, and involved
with R, S and ESS for a long time before that. We intend for the
relationship between Revolution and the community is a positive one --
the R community is one of the things that makes R so great. We've made
positive contributions: we've released a number of open-source R
packages to the community (including "foreach" and "doMC"),
contributed fixes to the core R engine, we've launched and sponsor
several R User Groups to foster local R communities (mainly in the US,
so far), we sponsor student projects in R, fund R conferences
(including UseR!) and personally I've been active in evangelizing the
wonders of R to the statistics community in general (at our blog,
blog.revolutionanalytics.com, and in the media, such as last year's
New York Times article).

The forums aren't intended to compete with this list, but provide a
venue for Revolution-specific discussions which might be out-of-place
on this list. (Sorry about the technical difficulties you're having --
Sherry from support is following up with you as I write this.) In the
same way, our new community site inside-R.org isn't intended to
compete with other R community sites but to promote the best content
(read more here: http://bit.ly/c6v80J ). Overall, our goal is to
support and grow the R community everywhere (while selling
subscriptions for Revolution R in commercial organizations). Yes, it's
the real deal.

# David Smith

--
David M Smith <da...@revolutionanalytics.com>
VP of Marketing, Revolution Analytics http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
Tel: +1 (650) 330-0553 x205 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)

[Duncan Murdoch]

I would agree with David that Revolution has made real contributions.
There is naturally some tension between volunteer contributors to open
source projects and people who make money from the projects, but I think
in the case of Revolution they've made a sincere effort to contribute
back to the project. (Disclaimer: I did a small amount of contract
work for them a couple of years ago.)

Duncan Murdoch

[Tal Galili]

Hi Iaw (or Ivo ?!),

I have seen REvolution in useR 2009. I personally know one of the students
they sponsored once, and have been following David Smith's (great) online
work for over a year now.
REvolution is real, and I hope they (and more companies like them)
will flourish in the future.

I agree with Duncan that finding the balance between open-source community
and paid company employers can be a tricky game to play. But it seems to me
that REvolution (and especially David Smith), have been doing not bad at
all.
I hope that other R based companies, like:

- R+ <http://www.experience-rplus.com/> from XL Solutions.
- RStat <http://random-technologies-llc.com/products/RStat/rstat>
- S-PLUS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PLUS>

Would have acted more in a similar way.
(And if they do, I didn't know about it and would like to have been more
informed)


Best,
Tal



----------------Contact
Details:-------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: Tal.G...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845
Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
www.r-statistics.com (English)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 4:08 PM, ivo welch <ivo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R.  Is the relationship
> between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one?  Do
> the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter?  Is
> there a competitive aspect?  is their forum competitive with r-help?
> any other thoughts?  (most of all, I simply hope that they help some
> of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have volunteered their
> expertise to help me so many times.)

It seems to me that Revolution Analytics are doing an awful lot of
good things for giving R a corporate voice, and are developing a lot
of stuff and releasing under Open Source licensing which is a good
thing too.

But... I really don't like the offer of free Revolution Enterprise R
for academic use. It muddies the water of what is Free (as in beer)
and Free (as in speech). It's bad enough that English only has the one
word for the two concepts.

As an academic, I don't use proprietary software not because it is
expensive, but because if it's closed source and not freely
redistributable then it's not a scientific tool. It becomes alchemical
magick. It may be the philosopher's stone that turns your base data
into analytical gold, but I can't examine it to see how it works, I
can't give it to someone else, I can't make a copy of it.

I would rather see RA charge a price for academic use, since that
will make it clear that this is not Free (as in speech) software and
will also make people read the small print on the contract. Although
many people don't read the small print even when there is money
involved:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/04/15/gamestation-we-own-your-soul/1

I've known Dave Smith for many years - we first met when he was in
Lancaster. He was developing an Splus package for longitudinal data
which, ironically, he released under the GPL while I was selling the
Splus version of splancs for 60 pounds! Oh how we change! :)

Barry

[ivo welch]

thank you, everybody, for enlightening me and others about the
relationships involved. I hope Revolution R and other companies like
it will succeed. I don't mind RR being free to academics---if nothing
else, I like it for the fact that I can install RR without worry on a
couple of different computers I own, and not have to worry about
licenses. (this is why I do not like matlab.)

what I do hope for is compatibility---that is, if a program runs on
RR, it should also run under R. maybe just having stubs that link to
slower native facilities under standard R for anything RR does special
would be good. IMHO, R would benefit from line numbers (for error
messages and debugging, GUI preferably) and ubiquitous multithreading.
then again, as far as I am concerned, the folks who are developing it
are saints for having put together what they have put together. I
hope that, if RR succeeds, they get to make a ton of $$s consulting,
too.

I also like the idea that people like myself, who are primarily
end-users and thus benefit greatly, should pay at least some. this
would be best done if all like me where to contribute. too much
free-riding. I like the idea of "nag-ware"---if you have not paid and
you are using the 64-bit package (rather than the 32-bit package),
there could be a small sleep-time at startup and/or some nagging to
donate $25 via paypal to the foundation.

this reminds me---time to donate. I should do so through my research
budget, but this is difficult when called a donation. I wish the
foundation sold a few overpriced trinkets (or r-help support
certificates or whatever) for me to run by our own university
accounting system. they would see it strange otherwise if a
tax-exempt organization (like Brown U) were to donate money to a
non-tax-exempt institution (like the R foundation).

/iaw

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/05/2010 4:03 PM, Tal Galili wrote:
> Hi Iaw (or Ivo ?!),
>
> I have seen REvolution in useR 2009. I personally know one of the students
> they sponsored once, and have been following David Smith's (great) online
> work for over a year now.
> REvolution is real, and I hope they (and more companies like them)
> will flourish in the future.
>
> I agree with Duncan that finding the balance between open-source community
> and paid company employers can be a tricky game to play. But it seems to me
> that REvolution (and especially David Smith), have been doing not bad at
> all.
> I hope that other R based companies, like:
>
> - R+ <http://www.experience-rplus.com/> from XL Solutions.
> - RStat <http://random-technologies-llc.com/products/RStat/rstat>
> - S-PLUS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PLUS>
>

S-PLUS isn't a company, it's a product. The company that currently owns
it is Tibco Software, as the Wikipedia article mentions. And Bill
Dunlap of Tibco has been making valuable contributions to S and S-PLUS
for years, and more recently to R on this mailing list.

Duncan Murdoch

[Tal Galili]

Thanks for the corrections Duncan,
I didn't know about Bill Dunlap affiliation with Tibco.

Best,
Tal


----------------Contact
Details:-------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: Tal.G...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845
Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
www.r-statistics.com (English)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Louis Bajuk-Yorgan]

> I hope that other R based companies, like:
>

> - S-PLUS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PLUS>
>
> Would have acted more in a similar way.
> (And if they do, I didn't know about it and would like to have been
more
> informed)

Tal

One clarification--S-PLUS is not based on R. However, it does share a
common pedigree.

It (like R) is based on the S language, originally developed at Bell
Labs in the 1970's by a group led by John Chambers. S-PLUS was first
commercialized (based on S) in the late 80's, well before the initial
development of R.

Insightful (and its predecessors), the makers of S-PLUS, have a long
history of collaboration with the R project. Since our acquisition by
TIBCO in 2008, we have shifted our focus to continuing to advance S+
while embracing R, and focusing on extending the reach of both to wider
commercial audiences (through integration with Spotfire and other TIBCO
products).

One of our developers (Bill Dunlap) is a regular contributor to this
forum and correspondent with the R core team. We also are contributors
to the R Foundation and sponsors of useR. However, we are always looking
for more ways to contribute to the R community, and I'd be open to any
suggestions you (or any of the other list members) have on that.

Lou Bajuk-Yorgan
Sr. Director, Product Management
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
lba...@tibco.com
http://spotfire.tibco.com