Jay,
sorry if my post was not precise enough. I simply wanted to point out
that I personally have no problem at all with commercial R products as I
have the free choice to use them or their open source alternatives. In
addition Revolutions is supplying their packages for free to the R
community which is great! I was purely curios whether other R users may
have different opinions but as you are the only one replying I would
imagine that this is no problem for most users. I will browse the list
archive as you suggeted to get some impression on this.
So, it is probably time to close this post for not beating the dead
horse? Thanks anyway, Jay, for your detailed explanations of the origin
of these R packages!
Best
Jannis
On 10/21/2011 02:34 AM, Jay Emerson wrote:
Jannis,
I'm not complete sure I understand your first point, but maybe someone
from REvolution will weigh in. Nobody is forcing anyone to purchase
any products, and there are attractive alternatives such as the CRAN R
and R Studio (to name two). This issue has arisen many times of the
various lists and you are welcome to search the archives and read many
very intelligent, thoughtful opinions.
As for foreach, etc... if you have fairly focused questions
(preferably with a reproducible example if there is a problem) and if
you have done reading on examples available on using it, then you
might try joining the r-sig-...@r-project.org group. Clearly there
are far more users of "core" R and hence "mainstream" questions on
r-help are likely to be answered more quickly (on average) than
specialized questions.
Regards,
Jay
On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Jannis<bt_jan...@yahoo.de> wrote:
Dear list members, dear Jay,
Well, I personally do not care about Revolutions Analytics selling their
products as this is also included into the idea of many open source
licences. Especially as Revolutions provide their packages to the community
and its is everybodies personal choice to buy their special R version.
I was just wondering about this issue as usually most questions on r-help
are answered pretty soon and by many different people and I had the
impression that this is not the case for posts regarding the
foreach/doMC/doSMP etc packages. This may, however, be also due to the
probably limited use of these packages for most users who do not need these
high performance computing things. Or it was just my personal perception or
pure chance.
Thanks however, to the authors of such packages! They were of great help to
me on several ocasions and I have deep respect for everybody devoting his
time to open source software!
Jannis
On 10/19/2011 01:26 PM, Jay Emerson wrote:
P.S. Is there any particular reason why there are so seldom answers to
posts regarding foreach and all these doMC/doSMP packages ? Do so few
people use these packages or does this have anything to do with the
commercial origin of these packages?
Jannis,
An interesting question. I'm a huge fan of foreach and the parallel
backends, and have used foreach in some of my packages. It leaves the
choice of backend to the user, rather than forcing some environment.
If you like multicore, great -- the package doesn't care. Someone
else may use doSNOW. No problem.
To answer your question, foreach was originally written by (primarily,
at least) Steve Weston, previously of REvolution Computing. It, along
with some of the parallel backends (perhaps all at this point, I'm out
of touch) are available open-source. Hence, I'd argue that the
"commercial origin" is a moot point -- it doesn't matter, it will
always be available, and it's really useful. Steve is no longer with
REvolution, however, and I can't speak for the responsiveness/interest
of current REvolution folks on this point. Scanning R-help daily for
things relating to my own packages is something I try to do, but it
doesn't always happen.
I would like to think foreach is widely used -- it does have a growing
list of reverse depends/suggests. And was updated as recently as last
May, I just noticed.
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html
Jay
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