[R] R in the NY Times

[Marc Schwartz]

on 01/08/2009 01:12 PM Andrew Choens wrote:
> 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. 

I would also note that R has been available via the Fedora yum repos for
some time, which as with the Debian/Ubuntu repos, would be missed in
just counting CRAN downloads.

There are quite a few other Linux distributions that have a similar
infrastructure in place where R is available as an 'add-on' or where the
main distribution itself includes R.

Additionally, there are many folks who will build R from source code,
using the updated source tarballs via FTP or, as I do, by getting the
source code right from the R subversion repo. These too would not be
considered in a CRAN based count.

> 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.

Correct. Trying extrapolate the number of users from any of these
measures is quite complex, if doable at all.

Even using the posting frequencies as I did yesterday, needs to be taken
with a grain of salt in trying to attempt to get a sense of growth.

As Dirk noted, the many R-SIG-* e-mail lists have offloaded some level
of traffic from R-Help, which may account for the rate of growth in the
R-Help posts declining somewhat since 2004 as Gabor pointed out, even
though the absolute number of annual posts continues to increase.

Reading the posts on SAS-L since yesterday via Google RSS, where the NYT
article was also posted, some have noted that SAS itself offers online
support forums (http://support.sas.com/forums/index.jspa). From a quick
review, it looks like the SAS.com forums date back to perhaps early
2006, thus possibly accounting for some of the leveling of the posts on
SAS-L recently.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz