Microsoft Joins the Linux Foundation’s R Consortium Along With Others
Today the Linux Foundation announced a new initiative called R Consortium- a group to unite the users of the open-source R programming language. Microsoft announced that it is joining it along with Google and more as a founding member.
R programming language is open-source and is widely used among statisticians and data scientists. R Consortium website writes: “The R language is an open source environment for statistical computing and graphics, and runs on a wide variety of computing platforms. The R language has enjoyed significant growth, and now supports over 2 million users. A broad range of industries have adopted the R language, including biotech, finance, research and high-technology industries. The R language is often integrated into third party analysis, visualization, and reporting applications.”
This R Consortium will assist the devs and users by providing support in the form of technical help and infrastructure. For quite some time, Microsoft has focused on data analytics in the cloud. Few months ago, the company acquired Revolution Analytics which is a prominent R distribution seller and provides support to the users.
Apart from Microsoft, other participating companies too have different types of commercial products based on the R programming language.
Also read: Windows Becoming Open Source? Microsoft Says it’s Definitely Possible
Microsoft said: “The R Consortium will support the R community by helping companies that rely on R — and their data scientists and developers — to work together to answer some of today’s most complex technology and research questions,” said David Smith, R Community Lead, Microsoft. “We’re excited to galvanize this initiative as a founding member.”
Over the past few years, the R community has grown exponentially- both in terms of the number of companies who rely on R to use it as a data science platform and the number of R users. Different users groups like the Bay Area R Users Group are already bringing R users together, but the new R Consortium would act as an unofficial supervising body.
“This is a great opportunity to harness the power of the thriving R user community around the globe and advance the R language for everyone,” said John Chambers, of the R project and a member of the R Foundation.
It should be noted that last week the Linux Foundation also launched the Open Container Project that brought companies like under the same hood.
Via: The Linux Foundation
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