Gilles Colling
I fell in love with the R ecosystem during my PhD. Thousands of open source packages, all free. I never had to depend on Microsoft or a university license to do science. Now I write ecology packages and put them on CRAN. Independent tools for independent science. #rstats
Mar 24 at 1:06pmWeb
Show threadKoantig1d ago

@GillesColling
I switched from Matlab to R overnight years ago, when my simulations suddenly stopped running on the local cluster following some change in what was allowed by the licence.

I was incensed and learned enough R to translate my original scripts in a few days. Never went back.

#RStats origin stories

Show threadKoantig1d ago

@GillesColling
Re: independence: it's high time to be wary of the dominating position posit occupies, and its direction of travel.

#rstats

Show threaddanwwilson 1d ago
@koantig @GillesColling That happened years ago when they became a supplier to palintir
Show threadBarry Rowlingson1d ago
@danwwilson @koantig @GillesColling and more recently, when positron was released as non-Open Source.
Show threadKoantig23h ago

@geospacedman @danwwilson @GillesColling Is that the case? I'm seeing an active repo here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron

(which incidentally contains a .claude folder)

GitHub - posit-dev/positron: Positron, a next-generation data science IDE

Positron, a next-generation data science IDE. Contribute to posit-dev/positron development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadBarry Rowlingson22h ago
@koantig @danwwilson @GillesColling The license is the Elastic License which restricts certain usages of the product, and hence makes it not an OSI approved license (which is why I capitalised Open Source). Feel free to commit PRs to that repo so that Posit can make more money (from Palantir and friends?).
Show threaddanwwilson 21h ago
@geospacedman @koantig @GillesColling Privatise the gains from the community…?
Show threadBarry Rowlingson21h ago
@danwwilson @koantig @GillesColling Quite. Obviously the community benefits if I do Posit's bug fixing but they're the only ones who can make money from it. From me. From the community. For free. But Posit are free to choose this license, we're all free to choose to use it or not. But I suspect a lot of people just think "I can see the source therefore its Free (as in freedom)". Am sticking with emacs and occasionally see how VS Codium/R is doing.
Show threaddanwwilson 21h ago
@geospacedman @koantig @GillesColling Getting started with eMacs is the hard part for me. Where, how? Is there a way to ease the friction? And soooo much <c-…> my pinky might die. But would be curious if I could find a way to get started and make sense of it.
Show threadBarry Rowlingson20h ago
@danwwilson @koantig @GillesColling That's one reason I suggest VS Codium for new coders. Or vanilla RStudio for R-only users, or Jupyter notebooks. Emacs has so much old baggage, has never been polished, has a tiny userbase compared to modern IDEs etc. But keyboard shortcuts win in whatever IDE you use! Every time I reach for my mouse when coding causes me pain!
Show threadKoantig20h ago

@geospacedman
Thank you for clarifying!

@danwwilson @GillesColling