Journal Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: R going quasi-closed-source? 2
A company called Revolution has a plan for making money from R, the gold standard in F/OSS statistics programming. That's fine, but the way they're planning to do it is a little disturbing. Two snippets from the first article really jump out at me:
Revolution is going to be employing an "open core" strategy, which means the core R programs will remain open source and be given tech support under a license model, but the key add-ons that make R more scalable will be closed source and sold under a separate license fee. Because most of those 2,500 add-ons for R were built by academics and Revolution wants to supplant SPSS and SAS as the tools used by students, Revolution will be giving the full single-user version of the R Enterprise stack away for free to academics.
So are they going to try to take CRAN offline? Because I don't think they can actually do that, legally speaking -- and if they did manage it, doing so would completely kill the advantages R currently enjoys over SAS, SPSS, etc. And then there's this bit:
Smith says that there are a number of problems with R that need to be addressed to help it go more mainstream. For one thing, he says that while R has a number of different graphical interfaces available, it is still fundamentally driven through a command line interface.
I'm honestly not sure if there's any response to that one.
Open core (Score:1)
Where the project owners are the same ones who are selling the extensions, I think open core is a bad idea because there's a conflict of interest - a motivation to hold back critical features. I do like the pay-for-support model. In that model some random stranger isn't monetizing the efforts of someone coding for free - it's just a business supporting the traditional "hire a geek to implement free software" model in a business framework CFOs can work with. Openfiler, to take one truly open rather than o
Thanks (Score:2)
I don't have any particular insight on this issue, but I'm glad you called my attention to it. Thanks, man.