The reason I like R rather than Stata (actually, there are many, but the initial reason) is that I can run R on as many computers as I have access to simultaneo

The reason I like R rather than Stata (actually, there are many, but the initial reason) is that I can run R on as many computers as I have access to simultaneously without worrying about license compliance. When I submit 1,000 jobs to a compute cluster to process genotyping, I don't worry that I'm violating a license. When I sold my business that used R as a core tool, I didn't worry that I had enough licenses. I think that is a valuable reason to actively prefer free as in beer and free as in liberty over even inexpensive but proprietary.