Dwindling software freedom in the R ecosystem

on YouTube ↗24m

" summary

R itself remains GPL v2-or-later, but the ecosystem drifts: Posit requires a contributor license agreement that allows proprietary forks, and many maintainers funnel patches through GitHub-only contribution workflows, blocking email patches. A concrete bug showed a dependency function working only inside RStudio; an email patch went ignored until someone opened a GitHub issue and a maintainer rewrote the fix. Posit’s blog highlights Snowflake, GitHub Copilot and Databricks; Posit Cloud in classrooms moves students onto a proprietary SaaS.

AI-written summary · about

" chapters (5)

1. 0:00R and software freedom
2. 5:30RStudio's proprietary shifts
3. 12:59Proprietary dominance on Posit's blog
4. 18:46Free software misconceptions
5. 21:57Solutions for software freedom

" related talks

• 24mRStudio: 2022 and BeyondHadley Wickham, JJ Allaire · rstudio::conf 2019
• 58mUpdates from PositJames E. Blair, Hadley Wickham, George Stagg, Charlotte Wickham · posit::conf(2024)
• 24mRStudio: 2022 and BeyondHadley Wickham, JJ Allaire · rstudio::conf(2022)
• 41mOpen Source Software for Data ScienceJ.J. Allaire · rstudio::conf 2019
• 01h 04mOpen Source, Open Mind: The Cost of Free SoftwareDylan Beattie · NDC Porto 2024
• 17mContributing to the R ProjectHeather Turner · posit::conf(2024)
• 13mYou're Doing it Wrong: OSPO DisastersVan Lindberg · Open Source Summit North America 2022
• 05mThe People of Posit: Bringing Personality to R PackagesJP Flores, Sarah Parker · posit::conf(2023)