[R] Revolution R and the R Community?

[David Smith]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:08 AM, ivo welch <ivowel at gmail.com> wrote:
> As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R.  Is the relationship
> between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one?  Do
> the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter?  Is
> there a competitive aspect?  is their forum competitive with r-help?
> any other thoughts?  (most of all, I simply hope that they help some
> of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have volunteered their
> expertise to help me so many times.)

I'm from Revolution (as of last week, newly rechristened Revolution
Analytics) -- I've been with them for almost two years, and involved
with R, S and ESS for a long time before that. We intend for the
relationship between Revolution and the community is a positive one --
the R community is one of the things that makes R so great. We've made
positive contributions: we've released a number of open-source R
packages to the community (including "foreach" and "doMC"),
contributed fixes to the core R engine, we've launched and sponsor
several R User Groups to foster local R communities (mainly in the US,
so far), we sponsor student projects in R, fund R conferences
(including UseR!) and personally I've been active in evangelizing the
wonders of R to the statistics community in general (at our blog,
blog.revolutionanalytics.com, and in the media, such as last year's
New York Times article).

The forums aren't intended to compete with this list, but provide a
venue for Revolution-specific discussions which might be out-of-place
on this list. (Sorry about the technical difficulties you're having --
Sherry from support is following up with you as I write this.) In the
same way, our new community site inside-R.org isn't intended to
compete with other R community sites but to promote the best content
(read more here: http://bit.ly/c6v80J ). Overall, our goal is to
support and grow the R community everywhere (while selling
subscriptions for Revolution R in commercial organizations). Yes, it's
the real deal.

# David Smith

-- 
David M Smith <david at revolutionanalytics.com>
VP of Marketing, Revolution Analytics  http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com
Tel: +1 (650) 330-0553 x205 (Palo Alto, CA, USA)