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*
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:01AM
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: 2) by frojack on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:16AM
Came here to say the same thing....
Now that I know that, I still can't bring myself to care.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:55AM
Consider its openwashing value.
The Latest ‘Microsoft is Open Source’ Propaganda a Parade of Lies [techrights.org]
gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:50AM
who cares
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:27AM
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
the chair is against the wall
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @05:33PM
Don't forget the pirates. They like to use R.
(Score: 1) by twistedcubic on Monday January 26 2015, @04:25AM
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
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
In this case I'm assuming R is a programming language?
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Sunday January 25 2015, @02:32AM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
That's easy to answer: (C+=2,C-2)
SCNR ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.