14 DAY TRIAL // After having helped the Node.js community set up The Node.js Foundation, The Linux Foundation is now helping the R programming language as well, by putting the bases of the R Consortium.
The R Foundation, which oversaw the R programming language's development in the previous years, will continue to exist and do the same thing while the R Consortium will act as an overseer and liaison between the R open-source community and various tech companies that have deployed the language in some of their services.
The R Consortium's main tasks are to provide funds to upgrade the R-Forge infrastructure and improve the existing documentation, with a more abstract goal of encouraging collaboration between the two sides on joint projects as well.
The consortium will be organized as a classic Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, being made up of a Technical Steering Committee and a Board of Directors, the same internal structure used for the Linux Foundation itself, and the aforementioned Node.js Foundation.
The R Foundation will continue to exist side by side with the R Consortium
The R programming language was designed to provide better tools for analyzing data structures by mathematicians and statisticians, but since its inception in 1993, the Web has evolved and is now handling larger and larger data structures, where R is much more suited compared to other languages like Java, C#, Python, or JavaScript.
As open-source technologies get deployed in more and more live production tools, companies usually tend to pay more attention to the general direction of the community and its development efforts.
This is exactly what happened with R, big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, HP, and Oracle, joining forces with smaller ones like RStudio, TIBCO Software, Alteryx, Ketchum Trading, and Mango Solutions, to make sure the underlying technology of many of their services won't make an unexpected left turn and derail their products.