Microsoft Buys Revolution Analytics

Interesting times ahead. Revolution Analytics, possibly the largest commercial supporter of R, has been purchased by Microsoft.

From: blogs.microsoft.com

Most people who know me have assumed I would be mad / disappointed / upset / frustrated or otherwise annoyed. They would also be wrong. This is terrific news.

This is very different from a seemingly similar, but disastrous, situation when Oracle bought out Sun Microsystems and became the owner of MySQL, OpenOffice.org and Java. When Oracle bought Sun, it became the owner and primary driving force behind these valuable open source properties. Since the purchase, Java has been a security nightmare. MySQL has seen a flurry of proprietary extensions, but comparatively little genuine development and OpenOffice.org was abandoned and then resurrected as LibreOffice.

Microsoft’s announcement is COMPLETELY different. They have purchased a company that specializes in supporting R. Yes, Revolution Analytics has done some valuable work developing R and it would be unfortunate if those efforts were to diminish, but there is currently no indication that is going to happen. In fact, I suspect the exact opposite will occur. I suspect we will see more development. Some of it may be proprietary, such as the Visual Studio extension, but some of it will probably continue to be open source. And Microsoft has DEEP pockets, so if they open source even a small fraction of what they do to the community, it will help make R more popular and more useful.

More importantly, Microsoft cannot affect future R development in the way Oracle has with MySQL. R-Core, CRAN, etc. are not part of this deal. The R Foundation continues to drive the development of R and if history is any indication, will continue to do an excellent job. R is still FOSS and will remain so. This is just an opportunity to inject more money and more opportunity into the ecosystem.

And that is a good thing.