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