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Brought To You By the Letter R: Microsoft Acquiring Revolution Analytics
theodp writes Maybe Bill Gates' Summer Reading this year will include The Art of R Programming. Pushing further into Big Data, Microsoft on Friday announced it's buying Revolution Analytics, the top commercial provider of software and services for the open-source R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. "By leveraging Revolution Analytics technology and services," blogged Microsoft's Joseph Sirosh, "we will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale." Revolution Analytics' David Smith added, "Now, Microsoft might seem like a strange bedfellow for an open-source company [RedHat:Linux as Revolution Analytics:R], but the company continues to make great strides in the open-source arena recently." Now that it has Microsoft's blessing, is it finally time for AP Statistics to switch its computational vehicle to R?
Drag and drop integrals.
Why good things are always acquired by douchebag companies and ruined to the ground? First Java, now this.
This is just another E^3 move.
Not true. Revolution's version of R is forked from the original version of R, which is and will remain free software (both libre, and gratis).
You hear it here first, R the open source programming language wont run on linux as from the next revision.
Why would the GNU Project stop developing R for Linux because Microsoft bought up some other company that in no way controls or holds copyright to the R source code? In what universe does that make sense?
A bit like skype, linux version doesnt really work much ever since that shit company bought that as well.
It's actually the opposite. The Linux client was much shittier before it was bought by Microsoft. It languished far behind other OSes with respect to bug fixes and new features.
R [Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.]
By leveraging .... (blah blah blah) .... we will empower ......
Using this kind of language informs the intelligent listener that you are an ASSHOLE.
some large company bought something good and then it went to shit. This particular company has a particularly bad rap sheet, and no, I don't have to look at linux for examples. I will say that they're not the only ones, and that red hat is actively remaking linux in windows' image, and thereby making it go shittier than it already was. In that respect, sheer size begets evil deeds for some reason. Not even google escaped that.
A huge problem at Microsoft seems to me to be that people there, or maybe just the leaders, seem socially unsophisticated. In fact, neither of the articles quoted below explains the underlying reason that Microsoft is buying Revolution Analytics. That needs to be explained. (All quotes retrieved Sunday, January 25, 2015, around 07:00 PST.)
... value"
... skills gap"
... platforms on-premises"
In The Official Microsoft Blog there is a lot of corporate-speak, of the kind used by people with no actual interest in a subject who nevertheless want to be considered knowledgeable:
"find
"data-driven decisions"
"reduce the
"enterprise-class platform"
"analytic solutions"
"advanced analytics within
"we are at the threshold"
From another article linked from that article, Revolution Analytics joins Microsoft, by "David Smith, Chief Community Officer":
"Microsoft might seem like a strange bedfellow for an open-source company..."
It was not a good idea to use the word "bedfellow". That word is more appropriate for a novel. The primary meaning of "bedfellow" is "a person who shares a bed with another".
'CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed "Microsoft loves Linux" '
On the surface, that makes no sense. Below the surface, is Microsoft trying to say, "We want Microsoft to be popular"?
"We're excited the work..."
That should have been "We're excited [that] the work...".
I'm not the only person who feels uncomfortable with those statements. One of the comments to that story is this one:
"What a joke. You're really working hard to try and convince readers that this is a good match, going on and on about how supportive Microsoft is of open-source. You were probably sweating while trying to come up with excuses as to why this is good, knowing that you were typing bullshit. I would suggest growing a pair of balls and just being honest, but I'm sure you've never had to do that in your career. -- Posted by: Anonymous | January 23, 2015 at 11:22"
David Smith replied to that comment: "Anonymous, I've never been anything but frank on this blog and this is no exception. I'm truly excited for the future, and I'm sure I speak for the rest of the team as well. -- Posted by: David Smith | January 23, 2015 at 11:25"
Sometimes the lack of social ability at Microsoft is shocking. The cover of the January 16, 2013 issue of BusinessWeek magazine has a large photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with the headline calling him "Monkey Boy". See the BusinessWeek cover in this article: Steve Ballmer Is No Longer A Monkey Boy, Says Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The BusinessWeek cover says "No More" and "Mr.", but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the magazine called him Monkey Boy -- on its cover.
In many years of following such things I have never seen such disrespect of a CEO. Of course, whoever wrote the cover headline was merely repeating a common phrase applied to Steve Ballmer by people in the computer industry.
Worst CEO: Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."
Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond
"is it finally time for AP Statistics to switch its computational vehicle to R?"
No. Absolutely not. R is not a reasonable language for computing: http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/eco...
Not possible, systemd already has the interpreter built in.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The bit about Skype is also not quite true. MS have done horrid/idiotic things with the UI, especially in the mobile versions, but I use the Linux desktop version almost daily and it works just fine for its intended purpose.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Except that, for example,
- video skype and desktop sharing is not available on Linux with more than two participants
- the Linux GUI is a confused mess
What makes you think GNU has anything to do with R (other than writing its license)?
There are numerous sources to support that. Two that probably hold some weight are:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/blur... and http://www.gnu.org/software/so..., both of which list R as a GNU package.
R was a great tool relative to other statistical computing tools until maybe a decade ago. It's still better than Matlab, but that's not saying much. There are better options these days, like for example SciPy with Pandas.
That only means that the FSF has chosen the package for the mythical "GNU operating system". It's no different from Debian or RedHat making an "R" package. Well, it is different in that the original "GNU operating system" remained eternal vaporware and "the GNU operating system" now consists of a haphazard mix of relabeled and restricted Linux distributions created by others.
Unfortunately, the FSF has a nasty habit of implying that they deserve credit for software whose creation they had nothing to do with. Other GNU packages were created by forking projects with more permissive licenses and slapping a GNU license on it.
The FSF early on contributed some useful software, and the GNU project set out to create an OS. I also think the GPL is a useful license (but not the only useful free or open source software license). But the FSF and GNU were made largely obsolete by open source software, and as far as I can tell, they haven't done much actual work recently (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
http://www.r-project.org/ also states that "R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues." So obviously the GNU project itself doesn't do a lot of actual development, though I would expect that they provide some administrative support in some form (perhaps in similar manner that the FSF does for many open source projects).
What "administrative support" do you think the FSF provides for "many open source projects"? All they ever seem to want to do is for you to transfer your copyright to them based on bogus justifications.
As far as the R Project is concerned, I don't see them listed as benefactors or supporting institution:
http://www.r-project.org/found...
Furthermore, the R copyright hasn't even been transferred to the FSF, it's held by the R Foundation.
I think this confusion over R illustrates again how the FSF likes to misrepresent its contributions and significance.
Being associated with GNU and the FSF used to be a positive thing; these days, I think it's a net negative for any project.
Instead of buying R, they could have downloaded it for free...
If Microsoft buys a company selling R services, and perhaps a fork of R... are they going to start putting their own Microsoft branding on it?
Would it be called RMS?
Ariastis writes Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other digital data belonging to three of its staffers to the FBI under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge. WikiLeaks were told last month of warrants which were served in March 2012. The subjects of the warrants were the investigations editor of WikiLeaks, the British citizen Sarah Harrison; the spokesperson for the organisation, Kristinn Hrafnsson; and Joseph Farrell, one of its senior editors. When it notified the WikiLeaks employees last month, Google said it had been unable to say anything about the warrants earlier as a gag order had been imposed.
http://socialn.co/vb/
That's pretty good evidence that there is some relationship, you are right.
However, R is developed by a team out of the University of Wisconsin Statistics Department, lead by Doug Bates. I believe that the team at UW, not GNU, makes decisions about the direction for R's future development.
Nevertheless, your original point stands and I agree with you that I don't see that team moving from linux any time soon.
Revolution Analytics among other things, is the creator and maintainer of a powerful package called R Studio Enterprise, which contains R language bindings to the major distributed processing packages -- Hadoop on Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, as well as Teradata and other platforms. In other words, it allows data scientists to leverage cluster computing networks to solve statistical analysis problems that are too big to fit in the memory of a single computer. This is what makes RA commercially valuable. It competes directly against SAS in the commercial world, and has made significant inroads as of late.
Given the difficulty and/or unwillingness by MS of bringing SSAS and SSRS capabilities up to a meaningful level, this might be their idea of easing the integration of R with those things. I'd still prefer not to use them, but at least if forced to do so, having a little bit of interoperability with R would make it feasible to create some useful stuff.