With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
REvolution Computing offers REvolution R, an enhanced distribution of R, as a free download. It also offers REvolution R Enterprise, a subscription-based version of R aimed at large companies that work with large data sets, and ParallelR (included in the Enterprise edition), which can take advantage of multi-processor systems and clusters for large data crunching tasks. R itself, and REvolution's versions, are being embraced in a number of fields, with a number of innovative new applications arriving.
R Commander is a GUI for the R programming language, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Among the existing R GUIs, Rcmdr together with its plug-ins is perhaps the more viable R-alternative to commercial statistical packages like SPSS. The package is highly useful to R novices, since for each analysis run it displays the underlying R code.
Description: RKWard aims to provide an easily extensible, easy to use IDE/GUI for the R-project. RKWard strives to combine the power of the R-language with the (relative) ease of use of commercial statistical packages. While RKWard is far from finished, it is already useful to R experts looking for an IDE interface to the R language. For R novices, it provides graphical dialogs for a limited but growing number of statistical and graphing features.
The burgeoning interest in R demonstrates that there’s demand for analytics to solve real, business-critical problems in a broad spectrum of companies and roles, and that some of the incumbent analytics offerings, in particular SAS and SPSS, don’t sufficiently meet the growing need for analytics in many major companies. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fspotfire.tibco.com%2Fcommunity%2Fblogs%2Fenterpriseanalytics%2Farchive%2F2009%2F01%2F08%2Fanalytics-in-the-nyt.aspx