Open Source R in Commercial Revolution
The following excerpt is from Timothy Prickett Morgan's article in The Register's Developer section, May 5 2010.
Click here for the full article.
Put on your eye patch and get out your parrot. The open source R programming language for statistical analysis and graphics is getting a commercial sponsor. What Red Hat did for Linux, Revolution Analytics wants to do for R, and it wants to use the open source subscription model to take on SAS Institute, SPSS (now part of IBM), and others who have been the market leaders (in terms of money) for statistical analysis for several decades.
While IT shops don't know about R, plenty of people have been using it for more than a decade to do statistical predictive analysis against all kinds of data sets and produce graphics for that analysis in a wide range of fields, including quants in financial services companies and researchers in pharmaceutical companies trying to sift new drugs from countless possibilities.