[R] R in Industry

[Spencer Graves]

      As Duncan indicated, I think R wins overwhelmingly  on this point: 

      What should you do if a key software vendor decides to increase 
their license fees beyond reason or obsolete a key product that burdens 
you with excessive transition costs?  Similarly, what do you do if you 
want to migrate a special application from some obscure operating system 
onto Windows or Linux, or you need some enhancements that should be 
minor but your vendor wants an excessive fee for that service?  If they 
see you as the only customer for a certain modification, their fees may 
be reasonable from their perspective. 

      With R, you can get the source code, so adapting it, modifying it, 
etc., should rarely be a problem.  With commercial software, you almost 
never get the source code, and you should consult attorneys before 
attempting to code something required to escape from a vendor whose fee 
structure is becoming prohibitive.  In many situations, just analyzing 
the legal issues could cost you more than paying someone to modify R 
code to support your changing needs. 

      Spencer Graves

Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2007, at 12:48 PM, Ben Fairbank wrote:
>   
>>  If my company
>> came to depend heavily on a fairly obscure R package (as we are
>> contemplating doing), what guarantee is there that it will be  
>> available
>> next month/year/decade?  I know of none, nor would I expect one.
>>     
>
> I would imagine that if there was a package that really needed  
> updating, then your company could hire an R programmer for a short  
> time to fix whatever needs fixing, and that would be a much smaller  
> expense than licensing an expensive package like those other ones out  
> there.
>
> But perhaps I am completely wrong in this, I am relatively far from  
> the industry world.
>
> Haris
>
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