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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.
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.