14InfoQ support with R
Federica Cugnata1, Silvia Salini2 and Elena Siletti2
1 University Centre of Statistics for Biomedical Sciences (CUSSB), Vita‐Salute San Raffaele University, Milano, Italy
2 Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
14.1 Introduction
R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It runs on a wide variety of platforms such as MS‐Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is available as free software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) GNU General Public License in source code form. It can be freely downloaded from the main CRAN repository at the URL: http://cran.r‐project.org or one of its mirrors.
Open‐source software is a term used to describe computer software which publishes for free the source code and makes it available to any user. The R code and its applications are protected under GNU General Public License, version 2 or 3, that provides rights to study, change, and distribute the software for any purpose. This enables a collaborative environment where many people around the globe can tweak, modify, and improve the software in question. As a result, an open software like R is upgraded at a faster pace than many other commercial alternatives.
R is similar to the S language and environment which was developed in the late 1970s by John Chambers and colleagues at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies). The S software was however ...
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