[R] Revolution Analytics reading SAS datasets

[Abhijit Dasgupta, PhD]

I'm sure the legal ground is tricky. However, OpenOffice and LibreOffice 
and KWord have been able to open the (proprietary) MS Word doc format 
for a while now, and they are open source (and Libre Office might even 
be GPL'd), so the algorithm is in fact "published" in Jeremy's sense, 
and has been for several years. I figure the reason for keeping the SAS 
reading functionality proprietary is Revolution's (perfectly legitimate) 
wish to make money by separating their product from GNU R and adding 
features that would make people want to buy rather than just download 
from CRAN.

Within GNU R there are of course sas.get in the Hmisc package (which 
requires SAS). It should also be quite easy to write a wrapper around 
dsread, a command-line closed source product freely downloadable in a 
limited form which will convert sas7bdat files to csv or tsv format (and 
SQL if you pay). This latter path won't require SAS locally.

I'm also sure that SAS has a way to export its datasets into R, since 
the current version of IML Studio will in fact interact with R.


On 02/10/2011 03:11 PM, Jeremy Miles wrote:
> On 10 February 2011 12:01, Matt Shotwell<matt at biostatmatt.com>  wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 10:44 -0800, David Smith wrote:
>>> The SAS import/export feature of Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 isn't
>>> open-source, so we can't release it in open-source Revolution R
>>> Community, or to CRAN as we do with the ParallelR packages (foreach,
>>> doMC, etc.).
>> Judging by the language of Dr. Nie's comments on the page linked below,
>> it seems unlikely this feature is the result of a licensing agreement
>> with SAS. Is that correct?
>>
>
> There was some discussion of this on the SAS email list.  People who
> seem to know what they were talking about said that they would have
> had to reverse engineer it to decode the file format.  It's slightly
> tricky legal ground - the file format can't be copyrighted but
> publishing the algorigthm might not be allowed.  I guess if they
> release it as open source, that could be construed as publishing the
> algorithm. (SPSS and WPS both can open SAS files, and I'd be surprised
> if SAS licensed to them.  [Esp WPS, who SAS are (or were) suing for
> all kinds of things in court in London.)
>
> Jeremy
>
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