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R vs. S-PLUS

2 messages · Gary Cable, David Kane

Original
Gary Cable
# 
Hi David,

Don't want to start a "flame war" either... 

Just a couple of points to clear the air and provide an update to your
information since 2001...

Insightful bought the rights to S in January 2004.

The comments regarding R as being primarily academic are quotes from the
RMETRICS web site. When I worked for UBS, we used freeware, spreadsheets and
S-PLUS (which was then still owned by Lucent). While we had large sums
exposed to the use of these tools, I am only stating my preference for
commercially supported products. I understand that a number of groups have
been using R for commercial purposes; I am simply saying that I believe that
Insightful may offer a better alternative in the long run.

There have been and will continue to be many improvements to S-PLUS and
Insightful products, support and documentation since 2001 -- including
several books and numerous contributions by Eric Zivot, Doug Martin,
Alexander McNeil, Rene Carmona, Mark Salmon... and the list goes on.

My interest is primarily in promoting what I think is a fine set of products
from a committed organization, and it is not my interest to detract from R,
but to point out what I believe are compelling reasons to use S-PLUS,
S+FinMetrics, S+NUOPT and the rest of our products for commercial solutions.

Regards,

Gary Cable

 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Kane [mailto:dave@kanecap.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 10:36 AM
To: Gary Cable
Cc: r-sig-finance@stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS

Gary Cable writes:
 > I recently joined Insightful Corporation as Product Manager for Financial
The theme that I hear most often is R versus S+, both being implementations
of the S language.

 > it can also be a weakness because it (IMO) does not represent a  >
commercial tool that provides me with stability, product support,  > and
professional services.

During 2001, I used both R and S+ simultaneously for some relatively serious
work. I found R superior then in terms of stability and product support.
Others opinions may differ.

 > R is primarily an academic solution. 

This is your opinion. Billions of dollars in real assets around the globe are
run using R every day. Maybe those managers are all idiots, but I doubt it.

 > Insightful owns the IP (the S Language) and is committed to its ongoing  >
improvement.

Does Insightful own the S language? I do not believe that this is true.

Dave Kane

PS. My purpose here is not to start a flame war. I can think of reasons why
someone in finance might prefer S+ to R --- easy data retrieval from Factset
and Bloomberg comes to mind. But there was no way that I could let a claim
about R being "primarily an academic solution" go unchallenged.
David Kane
# 
Gary Cable writes:
 > Insightful bought the rights to S in January 2004.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify this point. For those who are
interested, a news release is available here.

http://www.insightful.com/news_events/release.asp?RID=180

To be precise, Insightful "announced today that on January 19, 2004,
the company acquired the copyrights to the software code underlying
the "S" language from Lucent Technologies for $2 million."

Although I am not an intellectual property lawyer, I'll note that
"rights to S" is not the same thing as the "copyrights to the software
code underlying the "S" language." If Insightful actually had the
"rights to S," they would be able to able to charge me a fee for using
R, a dialect of S. Fortunately, this not the case.

Dave Kane