[R] R-business case

[(Ted Harding)]

On 16-Mar-04 Jason Turner wrote:
> giovanni merola wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> I am putting together a business case for R and I would like
>> to know if there exist statistics on the distribution of R in
>> academia, research and commercial institutions. The same
>> information about S-plus would be welcome. Please reply only if
>> you have consistent and certain information.
>> 
> 
> For the usual commercial reasons, getting hard data about commercial
> use is difficult.  I've usually just listed the customers' needs 
> (compatibility? particular OS/platform as standard? extensibility? 
> support?), and compared the strengths and weaknesses of R vs. other
> apps.

This is a question which could possibly fascinate members of this
list os statisticians (or possibly not ... ).

I gave quite some thought to a similar question some time ago:
how could one estimate the usage of Linux?

I came to the conclusion that it is probably impossible by reasonable
means to get an estimate, with any quantified reliability, of the
usage of Open Source software, except in restricted contexts.

Even with commercial software, while the companies will know (or
should) how many licences have been sold, this is not informative
about how many people use pirate copies, nor about how many people
have stopped using it. Nevertheless, it gives a good estimate
compared with what you could get for Open Source.

Whatever sampling trick you think up, there will be aspects
of the availability of OS, or of its dissemination, which will
be almost completely intangible. This, in my view, is why
although a weak lower bound may be feasible (e.g. the number of
active members of this list, for R), putting a margin of error
on it is not feasible.

However, if any of you have different ideas (or, even better, know
of good studies of this sort of question), then it would be very
interesting to hear of them!

Best wishes to all,
Ted.


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Date: 16-Mar-04                                       Time: 22:02:10
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