That’s reassuring about R and OpenSource.

Since I dislike what I see as the overhead of KDE stuff*, I usually use Gnome apps, and I used gnumeric in particular for a couple of years until OpenOffice(Neo on Mac) was fast and upgraded for most OSes. I still typically install gnumeric and Euler on any system I have that will take them.

If I’m at work I use Excel, which work bought for me, and the R plugin, anywhere else I use NeoOffice calc and R4Calc. It’s a little more work up front but both Excel (obviously) and NeoOffice can easily save as xls files, so people that don’t know R can see a spreadsheet or an R Dump spreadsheet. In OpenOffice I typically take the steps I typed in in R and save them as a “script” and load them with R4Calc.

Longwinded way of saying I like interoperability of R and Excel-like things because I feel they’re more accessible.

*In my experience, I had to load endless libraries and apps to run any single KDE app, and Gnome apps seemed friendlier in that dimension.

Regarding if this is a good or a bad thing, I think it’s generally a good thing and I assume R will stay opensource. Legally, it can’t not stay opensource

btw, the proprietary Excel uses its R plugin way, way better than the OpenOffice does its. I contribute a little money to openoffice sometimes, I wonder if I could put a bug in their ear and/or contribute some coding help to make R4Calc work better.