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-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On
Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 10:32 AM
To: Tony Breyal
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] R in the NY Times
2009/1/10 Tony Breyal <tony.breyal at 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
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