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I don't have much to say about the R ecosystem, as I am not actively using it or even doing anything using R. > Matloff is also upset about a commercial compan

I don't have much to say about the R ecosystem, as I am not actively using it or even doing anything using R. > Matloff is also upset about a commercial company swooping in to steal their precious, a common academic complaint (academics swooping in to steal ideas from commercially developed software is, of course, perfectly respectable). This reads like some kind of sarcastic statement. In fact it is indeed perfectly respectable, that academics do this, because it lets our society advance and research progress outside of proprietary software gardens. In my opinion any such kind of action is perfectly respectable, if it shares knowledge with the world. The other way around it is not OK, because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society. If a company is worth its salt, it will offer services on top of existing public knowledge, without creating walled gardens. If it cannot do so, then it might be time to realize, that the company should not exist. What is not OK is, if academics take that knowledge and make it seem like they were the ones inventing stuff. One should always give credit where credit is due. Never forget academic honesty. Usually however, a lot of foundational research is done by academics, only to be picked up years later and often by commercial entities dealing in proprietary software.

tfehring 5y ago
> If a company is worth its salt, it will offer services on top of existing public knowledge, without creating walled gardens. I contend that every profitable company leveraging public knowledge does offer services (broadly construed) on top of that knowledge, since otherwise no one would pay them. Maybe the minimal example is that in which the only service provided is marketing, but the range of service levels provided in practice runs the gamut. RStudio clearly goes well beyond that minimum. In some cases, the services offered are so valuable that the company can create a walled garden - which reduces the net value of those services to the customer but provides the company with monopolistic pricing power. (It’s not clear to me that RStudio’s products have significant lock-in, for what it’s worth. R has significant lock-in, like any programming language, and RStudio benefits from the lack of competitors creating good R tooling, but that’s not really a walled garden of RStudio’s making.)
- dls2016 5y ago
  Having recently started a Python project, the walled-garden approach seems to be the Anaconda choice.
unishark 5y ago
Academics might have their own grand plans for society, but funding agencies generally want industry to take over at some point and run with it. I expect they'd be happy to move on and fund something new rather than trying to compete with products that industry can provide. Personally I think RStudio is far less clunky than, say Jupyter. I still think Matlab is by far the best tool for engineering. I think having a company supporting the technology like that has generally been very beneficial. It's certainly possible they would just cause it to stagnate and milk it for cash as the technology dies out, but their business would die with it. Hence these examples have never stopped advancing.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Academics might have their own grand plans for society, but funding agencies generally want industry to take over at some point and run with it. Sure, but people can have different views about where that point should be. Documenting industry-relevant know-how makes it even easier for folks to take the result and run with it (providing the 'impact' that most funders will ultimately care about), so I agree with GP that it's very much a proper field for academic research.
admax88q 5y ago
You can't steal the ideas from academia or commercial. You can implement the same idea, but the previous one still exists. A company commercializing an idea from academia does not make that idea proprietary.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > You can't steal the ideas from academia or commercial. You can implement the same idea, but the previous one still exists. It's an important point, but only about abuse of the word "steal". > A company commercializing an idea from academia does not make that idea proprietary. It doesn't, up until they start armoring it with their own IP until nobody else can reasonably extend the original idea anymore...
themacguffinman 5y ago
> The other way around it is not OK, because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society You say this as if proprietary rules (ie. copyright and patents) weren't intentionally designed to incentivize knowledge creation & sharing by ensuring compensation for innovation. Creators can't pay bills with societal advancements and research progress. This is a really shallow "proprietary = bad" ideological take that I expect to see on the black & white pages of Stallman's website, not an (at least partly) entrepreneurial forum.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  (I apologize in advance, but I have to) tired: IP = bad wired: IP rules are "intentionally designed to incentivize knowledge creation & sharing by ensuring compensation for innovation" inspired: above isn't true in practice; IP rules have been thoroughly gamed, and their primary job is protecting monopolistic behavior, even if it means keeping knowledge suppressed past the point it becomes irrelevant or useless Copyright and patents, as practiced today, have mutated into a malignant form. That doesn't mean the idea is bad, just that it was taken too far - instead of creating idea-generating pump, we've ended up with toolkits for extracting rent from society and creating wasteful artificial scarcities.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Cory said it best: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/. Or at least I have not found it elsewhere being said in a better way yet.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Hah I appreciate the meme and can appreciate arguments that IP rules can be improved but frankly, tearing down IP rules because of some malignant outcomes is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At any rate, this is certainly more salient than "because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society" which could be a quote from The Onion where the article picture is someone typing this on their iPhone.
- 5y ago
rjzzleep 5y ago
OpenStack was definitely unnecessarily complex. And it led to many different distributions that were only manageable by hiring a lot of consulting manhours.
- touisteur 5y ago
  Ha ha memories of talking to RH salespeople and every time OpenStack was mentioned they were like "but you don't want that!" errr... OK I guess?
kybernetyk 5y ago
>because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society. Except for a profit motive for companies which then benefits society by lowering prices of products. If it weren't for private companies no one of us could afford a computer today.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  It's competition that keeps prices low - if private companies were to properly proprietarize core ideas around computing, we'd still be stuck with room-sized computers. Maintaining a market that's beneficial to society is an attempt to carefully tune interplay between many public and private concerns. From the point of view of society, the market is just a roundabout way of putting people on a treadmill and hanging carrots in front of them. We need companies to produce goods, provide services, and innovate better solutions, so we allow a degree of privileges and exclusivity for things that otherwise shouldn't be owned - like ideas. But we cannot allow companies to actually get the carrot and stop running - because it's the production and innovation treadmill that's the important thing (from society's POV). This model has been so successful that it blinded a generation or two of politicians - they let the donkeys get their carrots, and now we have fat donkeys saying to us, "if you want us to run the treadmill some more, give us the carrots".

tfehring 5y ago

> If a company is worth its salt, it will offer services on top of existing public knowledge, without creating walled gardens. I contend that every profitable company leveraging public knowledge does offer services (broadly construed) on top of that knowledge, since otherwise no one would pay them. Maybe the minimal example is that in which the only service provided is marketing, but the range of service levels provided in practice runs the gamut. RStudio clearly goes well beyond that minimum. In some cases, the services offered are so valuable that the company can create a walled garden - which reduces the net value of those services to the customer but provides the company with monopolistic pricing power. (It’s not clear to me that RStudio’s products have significant lock-in, for what it’s worth. R has significant lock-in, like any programming language, and RStudio benefits from the lack of competitors creating good R tooling, but that’s not really a walled garden of RStudio’s making.)

dls2016 5y ago
Having recently started a Python project, the walled-garden approach seems to be the Anaconda choice.

unishark 5y ago

Academics might have their own grand plans for society, but funding agencies generally want industry to take over at some point and run with it. I expect they'd be happy to move on and fund something new rather than trying to compete with products that industry can provide. Personally I think RStudio is far less clunky than, say Jupyter. I still think Matlab is by far the best tool for engineering. I think having a company supporting the technology like that has generally been very beneficial. It's certainly possible they would just cause it to stagnate and milk it for cash as the technology dies out, but their business would die with it. Hence these examples have never stopped advancing.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Academics might have their own grand plans for society, but funding agencies generally want industry to take over at some point and run with it. Sure, but people can have different views about where that point should be. Documenting industry-relevant know-how makes it even easier for folks to take the result and run with it (providing the 'impact' that most funders will ultimately care about), so I agree with GP that it's very much a proper field for academic research.

admax88q 5y ago

You can't steal the ideas from academia or commercial. You can implement the same idea, but the previous one still exists. A company commercializing an idea from academia does not make that idea proprietary.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> You can't steal the ideas from academia or commercial. You can implement the same idea, but the previous one still exists. It's an important point, but only about abuse of the word "steal". > A company commercializing an idea from academia does not make that idea proprietary. It doesn't, up until they start armoring it with their own IP until nobody else can reasonably extend the original idea anymore...

themacguffinman 5y ago

> The other way around it is not OK, because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society You say this as if proprietary rules (ie. copyright and patents) weren't intentionally designed to incentivize knowledge creation & sharing by ensuring compensation for innovation. Creators can't pay bills with societal advancements and research progress. This is a really shallow "proprietary = bad" ideological take that I expect to see on the black & white pages of Stallman's website, not an (at least partly) entrepreneurial forum.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
(I apologize in advance, but I have to) tired: IP = bad wired: IP rules are "intentionally designed to incentivize knowledge creation & sharing by ensuring compensation for innovation" inspired: above isn't true in practice; IP rules have been thoroughly gamed, and their primary job is protecting monopolistic behavior, even if it means keeping knowledge suppressed past the point it becomes irrelevant or useless Copyright and patents, as practiced today, have mutated into a malignant form. That doesn't mean the idea is bad, just that it was taken too far - instead of creating idea-generating pump, we've ended up with toolkits for extracting rent from society and creating wasteful artificial scarcities.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Cory said it best: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/. Or at least I have not found it elsewhere being said in a better way yet.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  Hah I appreciate the meme and can appreciate arguments that IP rules can be improved but frankly, tearing down IP rules because of some malignant outcomes is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At any rate, this is certainly more salient than "because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society" which could be a quote from The Onion where the article picture is someone typing this on their iPhone.
5y ago

rjzzleep 5y ago

OpenStack was definitely unnecessarily complex. And it led to many different distributions that were only manageable by hiring a lot of consulting manhours.

touisteur 5y ago
Ha ha memories of talking to RH salespeople and every time OpenStack was mentioned they were like "but you don't want that!" errr... OK I guess?

kybernetyk 5y ago

>because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society. Except for a profit motive for companies which then benefits society by lowering prices of products. If it weren't for private companies no one of us could afford a computer today.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
It's competition that keeps prices low - if private companies were to properly proprietarize core ideas around computing, we'd still be stuck with room-sized computers. Maintaining a market that's beneficial to society is an attempt to carefully tune interplay between many public and private concerns. From the point of view of society, the market is just a roundabout way of putting people on a treadmill and hanging carrots in front of them. We need companies to produce goods, provide services, and innovate better solutions, so we allow a degree of privileges and exclusivity for things that otherwise shouldn't be owned - like ideas. But we cannot allow companies to actually get the carrot and stop running - because it's the production and innovation treadmill that's the important thing (from society's POV). This model has been so successful that it blinded a generation or two of politicians - they let the donkeys get their carrots, and now we have fat donkeys saying to us, "if you want us to run the treadmill some more, give us the carrots".