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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.
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.
They haven't bought R. R is a GNU Project and still is even after this acquisition of a third party company.
"In that respect, sheer size begets evil deeds for some reason."
I have a corporation and so before creating it I studied some aspects of the corporate structure before creating it. That and observation has brought me to the conclusion that there are two factors, at least in the US, which turn corporations into sociopaths:
1) The only real mandate they have is to funnel money to the stockholders, and in this day in age the most powerful stock holders are the CEOs and BODs
2) Avoidance of responsibility is enshrined in the corporate charter model law. Showing that the CEO and BOD are responsible for corporate dysfunction, which often leads to people dying, is nigh on impossible. Esp. when corporate assets can be used to defend the CEO and BOD.
Until that is fixed corporate evil is almost a given.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Microsoft acquired a company who develops a forked version of R. R itself is a GNU project and is not owned or controlled by either Microsoft or the company they bought. You're hyperventilating over nothing.
It's ancient history, but when Microsoft put some money into perl-on-Windows development, there were a lot of ruffled feathers and panicky headlines.
It didn't amount to anything even close to "taking over perl", even during the nastier stretch of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" era, but asking people to remember things that happened so long ago is obviously too much.
Log in or piss off.
And this won't amount to anything either. The company they acquired neither controls the R Project nor holds any copyrights to it.
Arrrrr it's the c
"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...
Microsoft is large. Very F**** large. Their development tool division, while it has had some hiccups over the years, overall has been pretty good, devs liked them and they were always pushing to embrace open source. The rest of the company, not so much.
So things like this look weird depending on where you're looking from. If you look at Microsoft the company that makes Windows and Office, this is awkward, they're trying too hard, etc.
If you look at it from Microsoft the company that makes C#, has been pushing a bunch of open source stuff for a pretty long time now, has Microsoft Research, etc, its really not that special and pretty much expected of them at this point, even if it wasn't true 15 years ago.
They're trying to take the "cool" division and make it do things that affect Microsoft's reputation as a whole. That will be long and hard.
Not possible, systemd already has the interpreter built in.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
On the contrary, now the forked version of R has more resources than the open source version. Time to freak out.
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.
Step 1: Embrace Step 2: Extend. Step 3: Extinguish. Step 4: Profit! I think this brings us between 2 and 3, which is not the greatest news for open source R.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
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
Where is Perl in the relative rankings of programming language usage today? I'm not suggesting any correlation, let alone causation, but it is interesting to ponder the question.
Sigh. One word. Cloud. Or, to tie it a little closer to Microsoft's home, Azure. This is a Big Data play people. Big Data requires Big Compute, and Big Storage. This is likely because Microsoft wants to make R work better on its cloud offering than any other vendors. We will have to see if that means locking other cloud vendors out or not, but I'm hoping that with the new direction (open sourcing .NET anyone?) they will not try that tactic again. Only time will tell. I'm not suggesting that we let our guard down, but at the same time let's not jump to conclusions.
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.
The forked version is still GPL.
One thing of note is that this particular acquisition is not DevDiv, it's Azure ML. But Azure ML is, in some ways, even more F/OSS friendly - at least I don't know anyone else in MS running Linux servers in production for user-facing services, and it's where a lot of ex-MSR guys (like, from those labs that were closed) ended up. It's also where all the Python stuff now is.
Then again, after Satya's takeover, there was a strong push from top down to stop treating open source in general and Linux in particular as pariah, in all divisions. In no uncertain language, like "we've been acting stupid about this for a while now and let competitors eat our lunch; time to catch up while we still can". The recent slew of announcements, from .NET Core officially supported on Linux, to most open MS projects migrating to GitHub, is the outcome.
FWIW, I didn't think I'd ever hear a Microsoft lawyer utter the words "GPL is actually kinda cool" while explaining to developers the company's new open source policy in his official capacity. Yet, here we are.
Long and hard? Yes. But this kind of thing makes it worth it (and also shows that, perhaps, it's not quite all that long if you go fast enough).
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).
Have you considered that, if it did get past the lawyers, then they are respecting it to the extent the law requires them to?
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.
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.
In all honesty, I don't know where it is exactly, but I'm confident that it's where it would've been anyway had Microsoft done absolutely nothing. I'll blame any usage drop solidly on the rise of PHP, Python and maybe Ruby.
Log in or piss off.
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.