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<m...@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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