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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday January 24 2015, @11:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-get-what-you-measure dept.

A post on the Revolution Analytics Blog announced today that it had been acquired by Microsoft.

For what it's worth, they say that users experiences' shouldn't change:

For our users and customers, nothing much will change with the acquisition. We’ll continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products — including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R. We’ll continue to offer expert technical support for R with Revolution R Plus subscriptions from the same team of R experts. We’ll continue to advance the big data and enterprise integration capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise. And we’ll continue to offer expert technical training and consulting services.

I hope that is true, but I'm far more worried that the talents of the likes of Hadley Wickham and the recent surge of R development are going to be subsumed by the M-Monster, much like we've seen when other open source projects have been acquired by large software companies *ahemORACLEahem*

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:01AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:01AM (#137723) Homepage

    Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing.

    I don't think including what Company X does or why we should care that they've been acquired would have been too much to expect in the summary.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:50AM (#137734)

    who cares

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:27AM (#137740)

      Statisticians who use R, people who do a lot of data analysis like search engines, insurance medical etc. It's a powerful and heavily used tool in a lot of fields.

      Now that Microsoft is embracing it, those users will need to plan on finding a replacement.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:07AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:07AM (#137746)

        the chair is against the wall

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @05:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @05:33PM (#137927)

        Don't forget the pirates. They like to use R.

      • (Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Monday January 26 2015, @04:25AM

        by twistedcubic (929) on Monday January 26 2015, @04:25AM (#138079)

        Revolution Analytics is just some firm that does proprietary R stuff. I bet 91.7% of R users never heard of them. I only know of them because their blog posts occasionally show up on "R bloggers". My gut unproven theory: Oracle is to SQL as Revolution Analytics WANTS to be to R (without the evil empire part). But I don't think this is even possible, because the people who use R tend to be smart.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:11PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:11PM (#137992) Journal

      If Microsoft really did X [wikipedia.org], I would care. But I guess they still rely on GDI for their screen drawing. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:12AM (#137739)

    In this case I'm assuming R is a programming language?

    • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:32AM

      by MrGuy (1007) on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:32AM (#137748)

      Yes. Poorly named (IMO anything modern without an easily googleable name is poorly named), R is a statistical programming language used for a lot of algorithmic and big data "stuff." Like C and C++, it's named after it's relation to another language (the equally poorly named "S"). For a fun time, try googling for "R syntax" and see how many non-relevant results you get...

      Revolution Analytics neither created nor owned R. They did own a "flavor" of R (kind of like ANSI C vs. K&R C...) called Revolution R, as well as an IDE to create R syntax (which I believe was always a Visual Studio based product).

      • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:35AM

        by MrGuy (1007) on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:35AM (#137749)

        Self-correction - googling "R syntax" is considerably more relevant than it was last time I worked in R (which was admittedly about 5 years ago). Probably should have tried it again before asserting that wouldn't be good.

        I continue to maintain that the naming is poor, and trying to find a more esoteric result specific to R remains difficult, simply because the name of the language is just the single letter.

      • (Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:10AM

        by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:10AM (#137755)

        Poorly named (IMO anything modern without an easily googleable name is poorly named)

        You simply google "r programming language". My, how difficult that is. Oh and R dates back to 1993 long before Google ever existed.

        • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:44AM

          by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:44AM (#137824) Homepage

          You simply google "r programming language".

          That's wonderful if you already know it's a programming language.

          --
          systemd is Roko's Basilisk
          • (Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:43PM

            by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:43PM (#137876)

            You don't even need to know that. Typing "R" [lmgtfy.com] into Google gives the project's homepage as the first hit.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:15AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:15AM (#137814) Journal

    As Yoda said, this is why you fail. Everyone knows that predictability and reliability are the key aspects of software! So to jump from Eight to, XXXX I mean to jump from '95 to XXX to jump from C sharp to R is just a leap to far! How are we supposed to know that they are even remotely related? Everyone knows that after C sharp comes Dflat, on the downbeat, anyway.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:19PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:19PM (#137996) Journal

      In no scale I know C sharp is followed by D flat. Indeed, I don't know a single scale which has both C sharp and D flat.

      And on the piano, C sharp is D flat, therefore after C sharp comes D.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:01PM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:01PM (#138014) Journal

        Ah! You understand me perfectly! Yes, let's not quibble over details, but it definitely is not R! Now the question is, what comes after C++?

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:12PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:12PM (#138017) Journal

          Now the question is, what comes after C++?

          That's easy to answer: (C+=2,C-2)

          SCNR ;-)

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.