Thank you for this fascinating discussion.
I think that there are issues not addressed above. The developers of R and Linux probably have a fairly narrow range of motivations, explicit or hidden. And I suspect that TheEcologist is largely correct. But as Dason points out, there are some who ride the Open Source coattails hoping to gain some financial reward at a later date.
Another set of interests, though, are the users. And I'm pretty sure that the less-than-noble sentiments trinker brings forth do apply there. Some users like free stuff; some balance the work required to use Linux and R against the expense of commercial product and make ends-based decisions. Others are clearly political and want to avoid big business. And others use them for purely egoistic purposes (of course, the same can be said for many [TEX]\sout{Apple}[/TEX] commercial product users.
You guys have made my morning. Thanks.
John
I think that there are issues not addressed above. The developers of R and Linux probably have a fairly narrow range of motivations, explicit or hidden. And I suspect that TheEcologist is largely correct. But as Dason points out, there are some who ride the Open Source coattails hoping to gain some financial reward at a later date.
Another set of interests, though, are the users. And I'm pretty sure that the less-than-noble sentiments trinker brings forth do apply there. Some users like free stuff; some balance the work required to use Linux and R against the expense of commercial product and make ends-based decisions. Others are clearly political and want to avoid big business. And others use them for purely egoistic purposes (of course, the same can be said for many [TEX]\sout{Apple}[/TEX] commercial product users.
You guys have made my morning. Thanks.
John