[R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS

[David Kane]

Gary Cable writes:
 > Insightful bought the rights to S in January 2004.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify this point. For those who are
interested, a news release is available here.

http://www.insightful.com/news_events/release.asp?RID=180

To be precise, Insightful "announced today that on January 19, 2004,
the company acquired the copyrights to the software code underlying
the "S" language from Lucent Technologies for $2 million."

Although I am not an intellectual property lawyer, I'll note that
"rights to S" is not the same thing as the "copyrights to the software
code underlying the "S" language." If Insightful actually had the
"rights to S," they would be able to able to charge me a fee for using
R, a dialect of S. Fortunately, this not the case.

Dave Kane