Dear Kathy, As Achim has mentioned, I've been doing interviews with members of the R Core team and with some other people central to the R Project. Although I haven't entirely organized and finished reflecting on this material, the following factors come immediately to mind:
(1) Doug has already mentioned the personal and technical talents of the original developers, and their generosity in opening up development to a Core group and in making R open source. To that I would add the collective talents of the Core group as a whole. (2) R implements the S language, which already was in wide use, and which has many attractive features (each of use, etc.). (3) The R package system and the establishment of CRAN allowed literally hundreds of developers to contribute to the broader R Project. More generally, the Core group worked to integrate users into the R Project, e.g., through R News, the r-help list (though naive users aren't always treated gently there), and the useR conferences. Regards, John -------------------------------- John Fox, Professor Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4 905-525-9140x23604 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > project.org] On Behalf Of Kathy Gerber > Sent: February-15-08 2:53 PM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] History of R > > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.
