I think the substance of the issue is that the more eyes on code, the fewer the bugs (assuming a well-designed examination and debugging process is in place, as is typical for large open source projects like R). By this (obvious?)criterion, both the remarks about the dangers of proprietary code and the greater unreliability of R's lesser-used specialty packages, which by their nature tend to be less carefully perused, are valid.
Perhaps an argument is that certain code might not get written at all if it were not proprietary. Device drivers might be an example. But possibly other than that, it does seem like SAS needs to reconsider their marketing strategy and advertising claims. Anecdotal remark: I orginally moved from S-Plus to R because R provided **better** documentation, support, and had fewer bugs, which were more rapidly fixed when found. One of my smarter "investment" choices. Cheers to all, Bert Gunter -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 10:32 AM To: Tony Breyal Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times 2009/1/10 Tony Breyal <tony.bre...@googlemail.com>: > [SAS marketroid quote] > "In fact, SAS values open-source software." But clearly not enough to open-source SAS itself. It would seem that SAS values _other_people's_ open source. If SAS was open source and free, then SAS would collect on all the other things "Customers value SAS for" - support, testing, training, docs, etc etc. And there would be a lot more people using it. Another quote: "We advocate approaches based on science" - closed source is closed knowledge and is nearer alchemy than science. I may use proprietary software for video editing or music production, but when it comes to science, it's got to be open. Barru ______________________________________________ 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.
