The hidden costs of GPL software?

At 11/18/2004 07:01 AM Thursday, Thomas Sch??nhoff wrote:

To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based 
help-system, focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is 
already there, i.e. SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.

Hopefully I can  contribute to this in future, since it is seems to me 
invaluable to learn R by going through example-based lessons (some are 
found in vignette() ).
These are much more comprehensible to me than those short reference 
like entries in the current help-system, mostly due to their very 
technical approach (same is to be said about the official GNU R 
manuals, especially "The R Language", which wasn't a great help for me 
when I took my first look at GNU R). In this context something like 
the GuideMaps of Vista come to my mind!

But to be as clear as possible, I think GNU R is great and I 
appreciate all the efforts done by the R core team and associates!

Nevertheless it seems to be valuable to re-think the help-system in R 
with respect to those who may have a good understanding in statistics, 
but lacking some basic experiences in how to introduce themselves to 
sophisticated world of R/S languages.

(I posted similar material before, but it was moved to R-devel, and I 
wanted to express a bit of it here.)

I have frequently felt, like Thomas, that what could make R easier to 
use is not a GUI, but a help system more focused on tasks and examples, 
rather than on functions and packages.  This has obvious and large costs 
of development, and I am unlikely to contribute much myself, for reasons 
of time and ability.  Yet, I mention it for the sake of this discussion.

Such a help system could be a tree (or key) structure in which through 
making choices, the user's description of the desired task is gradually 
narrowed.  At the end of each twig of the tree would be a list of 
suggested functions for solving the problem, hyperlinked into the 
existing help system (which in many ways is outstanding and has evolved 
just as fast as R itself).  This could be coupled with the continued 
expansion of the number of examples in the help system.

Now I must express appreciation for what exists already that helps in 
this regard:  MASS (in its many editions), Introductory Statistics with 
R, Simple R, and the other free documentation that so many authors have 
generously provided.  Not to mention the superlative contribution of R 
itself, and the work of the R development team.  It is beyond my 
understanding how something so valuable and well thought out has been 
created by people with so many other responsibilities.

Mike