[R] Revolution Analytics reading SAS datasets

[Jeremy Miles]

On 10 February 2011 12:01, Matt Shotwell <matt at 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