Hello all, After many e-mails and comments, I made corrections to my post on the topic of R and funding. I hope this does a better service to the R community: http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/09/open-source-and-money-%E2%80%93-why-paying-r-developers-might-not-always-help-the-project/
Sorry for having too many exclamation marks on my original post. Best, Tal ----------------Contact Details:------------------------------------------------------- Contact me: tal.gal...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845 Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) | www.r-statistics.com (English) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 12:49 PM, jaropis <jaro...@zg.home.pl> wrote: > A few days ago Tal Galili posted a message about some controversies > concerning the future of R. Having read the discussions, especially those > following Ross Ihaka's post, I have come to the conclusion, that, as usual, > the problem is money. I doubt there would be discussions about dropping R > in > its present form if the R-Foundation were properly funded and could hire > computer scientists, programmers and statisticians. If a commercial company > is able to provide big-database and multicore solutions, then so would a > properly founded R-Foundation. > > In my opinion the main reason for the lack of funding is that the > Foundation > does not want to accept it from users and waits for the likes of Google to > bring them a sack of money. I have already posted about this, but this > seems > to be the time and place to repeat it: it is very difficult to donate > anything to the R-Foundation. First you have to find the appropriate link > at > the r-project page, then you have to fill out a form and send or fax it to > the Foundation. I am not comfortable sending my details over snail-mail or > fax. > > I would GLADLY donate 30-50$ each year just to see R develop, but there > needs to be a way for me to do it in a civilized manner. If the userbase of > R is over 2 million there will surely be 100,000 users who, like myself, > will happily fork out 40$ a year - would that help? you can do the > calculation yourselves. Set up a donation page in which I will be able to > pay by credit card or PayPal and you will start getting donations from > individual users. Advertise this at the startup message of the program: say > something like "support us at www.suppoRtR.com" and the money will start > coming. I am sure there would be enough to employ some foundation members > full-time, pay external CSs and even protect the system in court from those > who make money off of somebody else's work and do not give back to the > community (you know who I am talking about). > > R and the Foundation have helped a lot of us to do our research and make > real money. Now give us a chance to help you! > > > Regards > Jaroslaw Piskorski > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
