Dear list members, dear Jay,
Well, I personally do not care about Revolutions Analytics selling their
products as this is also included into the idea of many open source
licences. Especially as Revolutions provide their packages to the
community and its is everybodies personal choice to buy their special R
version.
I was just wondering about this issue as usually most questions on
r-help are answered pretty soon and by many different people and I had
the impression that this is not the case for posts regarding the
foreach/doMC/doSMP etc packages. This may, however, be also due to the
probably limited use of these packages for most users who do not need
these high performance computing things. Or it was just my personal
perception or pure chance.
Thanks however, to the authors of such packages! They were of great help
to me on several ocasions and I have deep respect for everybody devoting
his time to open source software!
Jannis
On 10/19/2011 01:26 PM, Jay Emerson wrote:
P.S. Is there any particular reason why there are so seldom answers to posts
regarding foreach and all these doMC/doSMP packages ? Do so few people use
these packages or does this have anything to do with the commercial origin of
these packages?
Jannis,
An interesting question. I'm a huge fan of foreach and the parallel
backends, and have used foreach in some of my packages. It leaves the
choice of backend to the user, rather than forcing some environment.
If you like multicore, great -- the package doesn't care. Someone
else may use doSNOW. No problem.
To answer your question, foreach was originally written by (primarily,
at least) Steve Weston, previously of REvolution Computing. It, along
with some of the parallel backends (perhaps all at this point, I'm out
of touch) are available open-source. Hence, I'd argue that the
"commercial origin" is a moot point -- it doesn't matter, it will
always be available, and it's really useful. Steve is no longer with
REvolution, however, and I can't speak for the responsiveness/interest
of current REvolution folks on this point. Scanning R-help daily for
things relating to my own packages is something I try to do, but it
doesn't always happen.
I would like to think foreach is widely used -- it does have a growing
list of reverse depends/suggests. And was updated as recently as last
May, I just noticed.
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html
Jay
______________________________________________
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.
