[R] Reasons to Use R

Mon Apr 9 19:45:27 CEST 2007

The licences keep changing, some have in the past but don't now, some
you can get an additional licence for home at a discounted price. Some
it depends on the type of licence you have at work (currently our SAS
licence is such that the 3 people in my group can all have it installed,
but at most 1 can be using it at any 1 time, how does that affect
installing/using it at home).  I may be able to install some of the
software at home also, but for most of them I have given up trying to
figure out the legality of it and so I have not installed them at home
to be on the safe side.

Some of the doctors I work with who are also affiliated with the local
university have mentioned that they can get a discounted academic
version of SAS and could use that, but my interpretation of the academic
licence that one showed me (probably not the most recent) said (in my
interpretation, I am not a lawyer) that if they published the results
without paying a licence upgrade fee, they would be violating the
licence (the academic version was intended for teaching only).

The R licence on the other hand is pretty clear that I can install it
and use it pretty much anywhere I want.

You are right in correcting me, R is not the only package that can be
used on multiple computers.  I do think it is the most straight forward
of the good ones.

-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
(801) 408-8111

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 10:44 AM
> To: Greg Snow
> Cc: Lorenzo Isella; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Reasons to Use R
> 
> I might be wrong about this but I thought that the licenses 
> for at least some of the commercial packages do let you make 
> a copy of the one you have at work for home use.
> 
> On 4/9/07, Greg Snow <Greg.Snow at intermountainmail.org> wrote:
> > Here are a couple more thougts to add to what you have 
> already received:
> >
> > You mentioned that price is not at issue, but there are other costs 
> > than money that you may want to look at.  On my work 
> machine I have R, 
> > S-PLUS, SAS, SPSS, and a couple of other stats programs; on 
> my laptop 
> > and home computers I have R installed.  So, if a deadline 
> is looming 
> > and I am working on a project mainly in R, it is easy to 
> work on it on 
> > the bus or at home (or in a boring meeting), the same does not work 
> > for a SAS or SPSS project (Hmm, thinking about this now, 
> maybe I need 
> > to do less in R :-).
> >
> > R and S-PLUS are very flexible/customizable, if you have a certain 
> > plot that you make often you can write your own 
> function/script to do 
> > it automatically, most other programs will give you their standard, 
> > then you have to modify it to meet your specifications.  
> With sweave 
> > (and the odf and html extensions) you can automate whole 
> reports, very 
> > useful for things that you do month after month.
> >
> > And what I think is the biggest advantage of R and S-PLUS 
> is that they 
> > strongly encourage you to think about your data.  Other 
> programs (at 
> > least that I am familiar with) tend to have 1 specific way 
> of treating 
> > your data, and expect you to modify your data to fit that programs 
> > model.  These models can be overrestrictive (force you to 
> restructure 
> > your data to fit their model) or underrestrictive (allow 
> things that 
> > should really be separate data objects to be combined into a single
> > "dataset") and sometimes both.  S on the other hand allows many 
> > different ways to store and work with your data, and as you analyze 
> > the data, different branches of new analysis open up depending on 
> > early results rather than just getting stock output for a 
> procedure.  
> > If all you want is a black box where data goes in one end and a 
> > specific answer comes out the other, then most programs 
> will work; but 
> > if you want to really understand what your data has to tell 
> you, then 
> > R/S-PLUS makes this easy and natural.
> >
> > Hope this helps,
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> > Statistical Data Center
> > Intermountain Healthcare
> > greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
> > (801) 408-8111
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> > > [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Lorenzo 
> > > Isella
> > > Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 9:02 AM
> > > To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > > Subject: [R] Reasons to Use R
> > >
> > > Dear All,
> > > The institute I work for is organizing an internal 
> workshop for High 
> > > Performance Computing (HPC).
> > > I am planning to attend it and talk a bit about fluid 
> dynamics, but 
> > > there is also quite a lot of interest devoted to data 
> > > post-processing and management of huge data sets.
> > > A lot of people are interested in image processing/pattern 
> > > recognition and statistic applied to geography/ecology, 
> but I would 
> > > like not to post this on too many lists.
> > > The final aim of the workshop is  understanding hardware 
> > > requirements and drafting a list of the equipment we 
> would like to 
> > > buy. I think this could be the venue to talk about R as well.
> > > Therefore, even if it is not exactly a typical mailing list 
> > > question, I would like to have suggestions about where to collect 
> > > info about:
> > > (1)Institutions (not only academia) using R (2)Hardware 
> > > requirements, possibly benchmarks (3)R & clusters, R & 
> multiple CPU 
> > > machines, R performance on different hardware.
> > > (4)finally, a list of the advantages for using R over commercial 
> > > statistical packages. The money-saving in itself is not a reason 
> > > good enough and some people are scared by the lack of 
> professional 
> > > support, though this mailing list is simply wonderful.
> > >
> > > Kind Regards
> > >
> > > Lorenzo Isella
> > >
> > > ______________________________________________
> > > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
> > >
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
> >
>