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El Reg reports
Microsoft had to emit a hasty update for its R Open analysis tool after developers found the open-source package was not playing nice with some Linux systems.
The issue was brought to light earlier this week by developer Norbert Preining, who found[1] that the Debian GNU/Linux version of Open R[2]--Microsoft's open-source implementation of the R statistics and data science tool--was causing headaches when it was installed on some systems.
In particular, Preining noted that the shell instructions Microsoft used to install the software would fail on a computer where another version of R is already installed. Worse, the script would delete whatever is at /bin/sh and override it with Bash, changing the system's command interpreter.
[...] Additionally, Preining found, the script Microsoft used to uninstall R Open would cause further problems, one being that it would delete files without checking where they actually pointed
[...] Fortunately, it looks as though Redmond was listening, and Microsoft's dev team was quick to act. Within two days of Preining's blog post going up, he reported that R Open had been patched by the Windows giant to resolve the issues and properly install and remove itself on Debian systems.
"Thanks Microsoft for the quick fix, it is good news that those playing with Open R will not be left with a hosed system", Preining noted.
[1] Text highlighting and scrollwheel scrolling on the page work now. Mouse actions were broken June 13. (Scrolling was mentioned down in the comments there.)
[2] Content is behind scripts.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @12:45PM (2 children)
R is a statistical language/software popular in many fields as mentioned in the summary. It IS opensource. I dont know what Microsoft is implementing in ITS opensource version but R is certainly opensource. I remember them buying a company that implemented R commercially (Revolution Analytics?) a while ago.
sbgen (not logged in)
(Score: 2) by goodie on Friday June 15 2018, @01:28PM (1 child)
My thoughts exactly... R is FOSS to begin with. I know that MS was implementing extensions to help with some of R's default shortcomings (e.g., automated parallelism, handling of large files etc) especially as they were integrating it in SQL Server 2016. But why would you need a separate version than the standard one is beyond me and would likely only cause headaches in the long run. But it's their right to do it I guess...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @01:36PM
With this version of R you can calculate and see why running Windows is cheaper than Linux for your enterprise.
They clearly needed completely different statistical tools to reach that conclusion...