R-statistics blog

I recently decided to make the plunge and install ubuntu 11.10 (32 bit) on my desktop. All went smoothly except for one bug: I couldn’t get Internet.

I use a wireless USB stick by edimax (it is called IEEE802.11b/g/n nano USB adapter or also EW-7811Un). The problem was that Ubuntu seems to be able to use the USB to see the networks around me, but when I tried to connect to my network (either when the router had the password on or off) – it just kept trying and failing to connect.

This is apparently a known bug which can be resolved after following some good leads from ubuntuforums (thanks the user “praseodym” for your help) and askubuntu (thank you user Engels Peralta for your help).

Bellow are the steps I needed to take in order to solve the problem in the smoothest fashion – I hope others might benefit from it in the future.
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This post can be summed up by one two sentences: “We can’t buy love.” “Starting to pay for love could make it disappear” while at the same time “We need money to live and love”. These two conflicting forces, with relation to open source, are the topic of this post.

This post is directed to the community of R users but is relevant to people of all open source projects. It deals with the question of open source projects and funding. Specifically, should a community of open source developers and users, once it exists, want to start raising/donating money to the main code contributers?

The conflict arises when, on the one side, we intuitively wish to repay the people who have helped us but worry of the implications of behavioral studies that suggests that doing so might destroy the motivation of the developers to continue working without contently getting payed, and that making the shift from doing something for one reason (whatever it is) to doing it for money, might not easily be turned back.
On the other side, developers needs to make a (good) living, and we (as a community) should strive for them to be well payed.
How can these two be reconciled?

This article won’t offer a decisive conclusions – and my hope is to invite discussion on the matter (from both amatures and professionals in the field of open source and behavioral economics) so to give more ideas for people to base their opinions on.

Update: this post was substantially updated from it’s original version, thanks to responses both in the comments, and especially in the e-mails. I apologies for writing a post that had needed so many corrections, and at the same time I am grateful for all the people who took the time to shed light in places where I was wrong.

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Motivation: R has issues – how do we get them fixed?

In the past two weeks there has been a raging debate regarding the future of R (hint: “what is R“). Without going deeper into the topic (I already wrote about it here, where you too can go and respond), I’ll sum up the issue with a quote from Ross Ihaka (one of the two founders of R) who recently wrote:

I’ve been worried for some time that R isn’t going to provide the base that we’re going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future is already upon us.) There are certainly efficiency problems (speed and memory use), but there are more fundamental issues too. Some of these were inherited from S and some are peculiar to R.

After this, several discussion threads where started around the web (for example: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6 ), but then a comment was made in the R-help mailing list by Jaroslaw Piskorski who wrote:

A few days ago Tal Galili posted a message about some controversies concerning the future of R. Having read the discussions, especially those following Ross Ihaka’s post, I have come to the conclusion, that, as usual, the problem is money. I doubt there would be discussions about dropping R in its present form if the R-Foundation were properly funded and could hire computer scientists, programmers and statisticians. If a commercial company is able to provide big-database and multicore solutions, then so would a properly founded R-Foundation.

To which my response is that: I strongly disagree with this statement..
That is, I do agree that money could help with things. It could be that money could be a part of the solution. But I doubt that the core of this problem is money. Nor that it would be solved if we could only now hire “computer scientists, programmers and statisticians” (although that could be part of the solution).

And the reason I am doubtful stems from two sources:

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The audio files of the full talk by Richard Stallman are attached to the end of this post.

Videos of all the invited talks of the useR! 2010 conference can be viewed on the R User Group blog

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Last week I had the honor of attending the talk given by Richard Stallman, the last keynote speaker on the useR 2010 conference.  In this post I will give a brief context for the talk, and then give the audio files of the talk, with some description of what was said in the talk.

Context for the talk

Richard Stallman can be viewed as (one of) the fathers of free software (free as in speech, not as in beer).

He is the man who led the GNU project for the creation of a free (as in speech, not as in beer) operation systems on the basis of which GNU-Linux, with its numerous distributions, was created.
Richard also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs,[4] the GNU Compiler Collection,[5], the GNU Debugger[6], and many tools in the GNU Coreutils

Richard also initiated the free software movement and in October 1985 he also founded it’s formal foundation and co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Stallman pioneered the concept of “copyleft” and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

You can read about him in the wiki article titles “Richard Stallman”

The useR 2010 conference is an annual 4 days conference of the community of people using R.  R is a free open source software for data analysis and statistical computing (Here is a bit more about what is R).

The conference this year was truly a wonderful experience for me.  I  had the pleasure of giving two talks (about which I will blog later this month), listened to numerous talks on the use of R, and had a chance to meet many (many) kind and interesting people.

Richard Stallmans talk

The talk took place on July 23rd 2010 at NIST U.S.  and was the concluding talk for the useR2010 conference.  The talk consisted of a two hour lecture followed by a half-hour question and answer session.

On a personal note, I was very impressed by Richards talk.  Richard is not a shy computer geek, but rather a serious leader and thinker trying to stir people to action.  His speech was a sermon on free software, the history of GNU-Linux, the various versions of GPL, and his own history involving them.

I believe this talk would be of interest to anyone who cares about social solidarity, free software, programming and the hope of a better world for all of us.

I am eager for your thoughts in the comments (but please keep a kind tone).

Here is Richard Stallmans  (2 hours) talk:

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Over a month ago, David Smith published a call for people to participate in the “Future of Open Source” Survey. 550 people (and me) took the survey, and today I got an e-mail with the news that the 2010 survey results are analysed and where published in the “Future.Of.Open.Source blog” In the following (38 slides) presentation:

I would like to thank Bryan House and anyone else who took part in making this survey, analyzing and publishing it’s results.

The presentation has left me with some thoughts and conclusions, I would like to share with you here.

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