The corporate legal where I work is deathly afraid of the GNU General Public License (GPL), because if we touch GPL software inappropriately with our commercial software, our copyrights are replaced by the GPL. This in turn means we can't charge royalties, which means we can't repay the investors who covered our initial development costs, and we file for bankruptcy. The rabid capitalists meet the rabid socialists and walk away, shaking their heads. (Sec. 2.b of the GPL: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." We can get around this by packaging accesses to GPL software as separately installed add-on(s), because then only the add-on(s) would be covered by the GPL.) Our corporate legal is more concerned about a possible law suit from a possible competitor than from the R Foundation, but the threat is still real and still being adjudicated in other cases.
If the GPL were not so tight on this point, someone could commercialize a GUI for R without having to offer their source code under the GPL.
However, even without this change, R seems to be the platform of choice for new statistical algorithm development by a growing portion of the international scientific community. Moreover, from my experience with this listserve, the technical support here is far superior to anything I've experienced with any other software in the 40+ years since I wrote my first Fortran code.
Best Wishes,
spencer gravesBerton Gunter wrote:
All:
I have much enjoyed the discussion. Thanks to all who have contibuted.
Two quick comments:
1. The problem of designing a GUI to make R's functionality more accessible is, I believe just one component of the larger issue of making statistical/data analysis functionality available to those who need to use it but do not have sufficient understanding and background to do so properly. I certainly include myself in this category in many circumstances. A willingness and commitment to learning ( = hard work!) is the only rational solution here, and saying that one doesn't have the time really doesn't cut it for me. Ditto for R language functionality?
2. However, R has many attractive features for data manipulation and graphics that make it attractive for common tasks that are now done most frequently with (ugh!) Excel (NOT Statistica, Systat, et. al.). For this subset of R's functionality a GUI would be attractive. However, writing a good GUI for graphing that even begins to take advantage of R's flexibility and power in this arena is an enormous -- perhaps an impossible -- task. Witness the S-Plus graphics GUI, which I think is truly awful (and appears to thwart more than it helps, at least from many of the queries one sees on that news list). So I'm not sanguine.
Again, thanks to all for a thoughful and enjoyable discussion.
-- Bert Gunter Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics South San Francisco, CA
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process." - George E. P. Box
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Patrick Burns
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 6:28 AM
To: Jan P. Smit
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Philippe Grosjean; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
I'm a big advocate -- perhaps even fanatic -- of making R easier for novices in order to spread its use, but I'm not convinced that a GUI (at least in the traditional form) is the most valuable approach.
Perhaps an overly harsh summary of some of Ted Harding's statements
is: You can make a truck easier to get into by taking off the wheels, but
that doesn't make it more useful.
In terms of GUIs, I think what R should focus on is the ability for user's
to make their own specialized GUI. So that a knowledgeable programmer
at an installation can create a system that is easy for unsophisticated
users for the limited number of tasks that are to be done. The ultimate
users may not even need to know that R exists.
I think Ted Harding was on the mark when he said that it is the help
system that needs enhancement. I can imagine a system that gets the
user to the right function and then helps fill in the arguments; all of the
time pointing them towards the command line rather than away from
it.
The author of the referenced article highlighted some hidden costs of R,
but did not highlight the hidden benefits (because they were hidden from
him). A big benefit of R is all of the bugs that aren't in it (which may or
may not be due to its free status).
Patrick Burns
Burns Statistics [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
Jan P. Smit wrote:
Dear Phillippe,
Very interesting. The URL of the article is http://www.scientific-computing.com/scwsepoct04free_statistics.html.
Best regards,
Jan Smit
Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Hello,
In the latest 'Scientific Computing World' magazine (issue 78, p. 22), there
is a review on free statistical software by Felix Grant ("doesn't have to
pay good money to obtain good statistics software"). As far as I know, this
is the first time that R is even mentioned in this magazine, given that it
usually discuss commercial products.
[ ...]
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