[R] Revolution Analytics reading SAS datasets

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "CH" == Chao(Charlie) Huang <hchao8 at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:32:06 -0600 writes:

    CH> I am right now using Revolution R Enterprise 4.2. Could
    CH> somebody show me how to import/export SAS
    CH> datasets. Thanks.

but not primarily on R-help, please.

At first, note that  R is GNU R,
and R-help has been about R as a Free ("Libre") Software,
for all its many years and hundreds of thousands of messages.

Revolutions's product may be fine for some, in some situations,
but supporting non-Free parts of it, really does not belong to R
and R-help in my view.

Martin Maechler, 
R Core and R mailing list administrator since 1996


    CH> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Abhijit Dasgupta, PhD
    CH> <aikidasgupta at gmail.com> wrote:
    >> 
    >> 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