R help - Jun 2009 - SAS CMO and SVP Jim Davis on Open Source, BI , competition, leadership succession & others

An interview with Chief Marketing Officer of SAS Institute, Jim Davis.

Here is an extract-

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/05/interview-jim-davis-sas-institute/

*Ajay -It is rare to find a major software company that has zero involvement
with open source movement (or as I call it with peer-reviewed code). Could
you name some of SAS Institute’s contribution to open source? What could be
further plans to enhance this position with the global community of
scientists?*

* Jim -* SAS does support open source and open standards too. Open standards
typically guide open source implementations (e.g., the OASIS work is guiding
some of the work in Eclipse Cosmos, some of the JCP standards guide the
Tomcat implementation, etc.).

Some examples of SAS’s contributions to open source and open standards
include:

* Apache Software Foundation* – a senior SAS developer has been a committer
on multiple releases of the Apache Tomcat project, and has also acted as
Release Coordinator.

*Eclipse Foundation* — SAS developers were among the early adopters of
Eclipse. One senior SAS developer wrote a tutorial whitepaper on using
Eclipse RCP, and was named “Top Ambassador” in the 2006 Eclipse Community
Awards. Another is a committer on the Eclipse Web Tools project. A third
proposed and led Eclipse’s Albireo project. SAS is a participant in the
Eclipse Cosmos project, with three R&D employees as committers. Finally,
SAS’ Rich Main served on the board of directors of the Eclipse Foundation
from 2003 to 2006, helping write the Eclipse Bylaws, Development Process,
Membership Agreement, Intellectual Property Policy and Public License.

*Java Community Process *– SAS has been a Java licensee partner since 1997
and has been active in the Java Community Process. SAS has participated in
approximately 25 Java Specification Requests spanning both J2SE and J2EE
technology. Rich Main of SAS also served on the JCP Executive Committee from
2005 through 2008.

*OASIS* — A senior SAS developer serves as secretary of the OASIS Solution
Deployment Descriptor (SDD) Technical Committee. In total, six SAS employees
serve on this committee.

*XML for Analysis* — SAS co-sponsored XML for Analysis standard with
Microsoft and Hyperion.

*Others *– A small SAS team developed Cobertura, an open source coverage
analysis tool for Java. SAS (through our database access team) is one of the
top corporate contributors to Firebird, an open source relational database.
Another developer contributes to Slide WebDav. We’ve had people work on
HtmlUnit (another testing framework) and FreeBSD.

In addition, there are dozens if not hundreds of contributed bug reports,
fixes/patches from SAS developers using open source software. SAS will
continue to expand our work with and contribute to open-source tools and
communities.
For example, we know a number of our customers use R as well as SAS. So we
decided to make it easier for them to access R by .....

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/05/interview-jim-davis-sas-institute/

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