Locked
The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter 'R.'
Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.
On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.
All told, surging interest in the free R language could affect sales of SAS software, which can sell for thousands of dollars. Rather than running from the threat, SAS appears ready to try to understand R by adopting a more active role in its development.
...............................Read More at
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-source-one-letter-at-a-time/