[R] R in the NY Times

[Andrew Choens]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 10:42 -0600, Stas Kolenikov wrote:
> A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of
> r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect
> that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy
> to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt
> anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among
> friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...)
> should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those
> come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the
> network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway.

The number of r-core downloads is definitely NOT representative of the
number of people using R. If you use R on Windows or OS X, you will
obviously download R from the mirrors. However, this methodology would
effectively ignore many users of R on Linux. I use R on a regular basis
and I have it installed on three separate systems, all running Ubuntu.
In all of these cases, I am downloading and installing r-core from the
Ubuntu Mirror in the USA, not from CRAN. 

Of course, the number of Linux users is miniscule compared to the number
of Windows users, but I think it is safe to say the Linux users are, in
general, a more tech-savvy group than Windows users and are more likely
to be comfortable using R's interactive programming interface. I think
it is also fair to say that MANY (though not all) Linux users would be
uncomfortable installing SPSS or SAS or Stata onto their open-source
system and would prefer to use R. Thus, Linux users probably account for
a higher proportion of R's user-base than they do in the general
computing population. . . . although I do not claim to actually know
this proportion.

Ehh. Comparing the popularity of computer software is incredibly tricky
to do, especially when some of the software being compared in
open-source.


-- 
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